#UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE WHO TEXT ME AT SIX AM CHRISTMAS MORNING

[freebooter4ever]

waking up at 7am like normal on my days off and then patiently waiting till 11am to text my friends here because im nice like that

[hotdemonsummer]

Obey Me! and Angelology and Demonology

 alternatively titled Lets Get Into Lucifer

This is yet another long, long post about the lore of Obey Me! from the perspective of historical and theological angelology, and demonology or the study of angels and demons respectively, because I think it’s neat. I also talk way too much. I’m scared to check the word count on this.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on anything, and certainly not on religion. I just like comparative theology. Also, spoilers for lesson 43/44.

What is an angel? And what, in turn, is a demon? It depends on who you ask. All religions that have angels have a general consensus that they are spiritual beings, intermediaries of some kind of higher power. Demons, on the other hand, are much more vague beyond general malevolence toward humanity. Any connection between the two is entirely dependent on the culture and religion in question. Some have angels but not demons, and many have vice versa.

There’s generally four kinds of spirits that are considered demons:

Dead people with extremely bad vibes (think mogwai, yuurei, and other revenants)

Neutral-to-malevolent energy, physical form optional (think djinni or yokai)

Cult subjects (including foreign gods and ancestor worship)

Corrupted angels (either fallen or Nephilim)

The word demon comes from the Greek δαίμων, or daimon, but the concept of a demon is much older than the Greeks. The original daimon had none of the malevolent, evil associations that we now think of. Instead, daimon just described a kind of powerful spiritual entity (for example, δαίμων is the term Euripides uses for the new god Dionysus in The Bacchae). What we think of as demons now didn’t exist in Greek culture, and the negative associations came when the Tanakh was translated from Hebrew to Greek, but even then shedim aren’t identical to the contemporary depiction of demons that we see in Obey Me!, which, like everything else in Western society, came about through the domination of Christianity.

Shedim, the precursor to the Christian demon, was more or less a term for false gods, a title for the various Levantine pagan gods (see: origin of Beelzebub, Belphegor, and pretty much every demon that starts with Bel- or Bal-). 

Obey Me! pretty much canonizes Type 2 and Type 4 demons, with characters like Diavolo, Barbatos, and Satan as Type 2 and the other brothers as Type 4. Historically, Beelzebub and Belphegor are Type 3 (Beelzebub and Belphegor being Levantine gods), Mammon being Type 2 (a general personification of Wealth, although Milton did write him as a Type 4 in Paradise Lost) and Asmodeus being somewhere in between Type 2 and 3 (being heavily derived from a Zoroastrian daeva of wrath). Lucifer is, historically, the only consistently Type 4 demon.

I don’t think I have to explain what a fallen angel is to any OM! fan. But I will. 

Let’s talk about these guys. We’re all familiar with Satan’s weird complex about Lucifer, and I’m sure we’re all equally familiar with how Satan and Lucifer are terms used interchangeably for whatever being is The Big Bad of Hell. However, they’re not synonymous.

Satan derives from the same Proto-Semitic root as shayatan, which... should be pretty obvious, but nonetheless has a pretty analogous role as a tempter of men in the Abrahamic religions. Beyond that “tempter of men” title, though, the actual details of what Satan is is incredibly varied, including whether or not “Satan” is a name or a title. In Christianity, the view of Satan as an extremely powerful and evil corrupter of man, wholly opposed to God, came around the Middle Ages, when witchcraft hysteria spread.

Lucifer, on the other hand, is simultaneously a figure originating in Christianity and much, much older than it. The term of course means “light-bringer”, and is heavily associated with the morning star, aka the planet Venus. To make a very long story short, many Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Mediterranean cultures saw the lowering of Venus toward the horizon at night and thought, “hey, thats a pretty neat image!” and created stories about heavenly beings falling toward the earth. Of course, they didn’t use the ‘term’ Lucifer, that’s Latin, and came from the Vulgate Bible.

The term Lucifer does not exclusively refer to The Evil Fallen Angel™ in Christian texts (some very sacred things like the Exsultet explicitly refer to Jesus as Lucifer), but it sure is the most popular interpretation. In works like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, the general idea is that the angel Lucifer rebelled against God in some way and was cast out of Heaven, then becoming Satan, and thus the two are one and the same.

(inb4 some Quora-type chews me out for accuracy’s sake, the “lucifer” mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 refers not to any angel, but to a Babylonian king. The whole fallen angel thing, much like the beatitudes or Bethlehem or Christmas, is a fusion of pagan influences.)

In other words, Lucifer is always and has always been a fallen angel. Satan, on the other hand, doesn’t have those connections to angelhood, and the two figures have an undeniable connection despite their clear individual differences. Sound familiar?

The next question is then what kind of angel is Lucifer anyway? to which you might be thinking, wait, there are different kinds? Yes, holy shit, there are so many kinds of angels and very little consensus on what they are. In terms of Christian angelology (because again, Lucifer is a uniquely Christian/derivative Christian figure unless you exclude Leland’s Aradia which I don’t because lbr they were Italian anyways), most hierarchies are based on the work of this guy:

This man has the incredibly succinct name of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and sometime in the 5th century he wrote a book called De Coelesti Hierarchia. It orders the *WTNV voice* hierarchy of angels into three levels called spheres, and each sphere has three sub-levels called choirs. Many, but not all, of the choirs are adopted from various Jewish angelic hierarchies. If you thought that it was just angels and then archangels were, like, the middle management version of angels then you are very wrong. I’m sorry that television lied.

You know who also lied? Tumblr dot com and any post that implies that the true form of angels is a big wheel with a bunch of eyes. That is, in fact, a descriptor for only one kind of angel: ophanim, or thrones. The depiction of angels runs the gamut from winged humanoids to multi-winged humanoids with multiple animal heads to burning snakes to vague heavenly mist.

Archangels and angels are the eighth and ninth lowest choirs of angels, respectively. Angels, or malakhim, are the default messengers of God and the choir from which guardian angels come from. Generally, if someone claims to have a message from God delivered to them, it will be an angel doing it. If it’s really important, it’ll be an archangel. Everyone else literally has more important things to do. No one’s getting visions from dominions.

Lucifer’s (the theological one) actual designation is kind of a mystery. Depending on the text, Lucifer has been described as a seraph (the highest), a cherub (the second highest), or an archangel (the eighth). According to Thomas Aquinas:

Lucifer, chief of the sinning angels, was probably the highest of all the angels. But there are some who think that Lucifer was highest only among the rebel angels.

Not very helpful, but hey. The question remains: what kind of angel is Lucifer, and this time I mean our Lucifer. 

We know that Michael, just like his namesake, is an archangel. We also know that (SPOILERS) Simeon, unlike his namesake, is an archangel as well (Simeon is a saint, not an angel.) Lucifer likely was at their level, if not higher.

However, Lucifer was also a six-winged angel, a depiction generally reserved for seraphim (and cherubim, but far less frequently).

Moreover, in terms of role, an angellic Lucifer fits well with that of the powers, the sixth choir. Powers are in charge of moving the heavenly bodies, and are depicted as powerful warriors dressed in beautiful armor. It's fitting for a being so closely tied to the morning star to be a power, after all.

So, with all that considered, what is Lucifer? 

Well, he’s a seraph (or saraph, technically). Why? Because Simeon is somehow a seraph and an archangel (I have already written too much to unpack that bullshit), and Mammon was a throne (remember those wheels with eyes?) and Beel was a cherub and therefore Lucifer had to be higher than both of them (interestingly big brother Mammon is in a lower choir than little brother Beel). This makes Michael kind of, well... weird, given the archangels’ low rank.

Some like to differentiate between archangel the eighth choir and Archangel, with a capital A, as a term for any high-ranking angel. While this is likely what Solmare is doing, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this has zero basis in any religious text whatsoever and is solely done for the convenience of not remembering anything besides angel and archangel. Which is like, fine, but I’m a pedantic jerk who I found claims to the contrary while researching and I felt the need to correct that.

Anyways, the more you know.

[blindlesbian]

A christmas buddie fic

This fic is for @fyeahbuddie​ for the 911 gift exchange. @officerrxyes​ Buck was in Eddie's kitchen baking festive cookies with Chris on Christmas Eve. He thought it would be the perfect way to wind down, but it ended up being harder than he imagined. Eddie accidentally added way more. Instead of twenty cookies, they were now baking forty. All three had spent the day out, hanging with friends and family. Unlike last year the 118 wasn't scheduled to work for the holiday, which everyone was thankful for. "How much longer is dad gonna be," Chris asked. Eddie was out buying more frosting because they'd run out. Chris was eager to finish decorating his cookies, and so was Buck. 

"Soon, don't worry." By the time the last batch of cookies finished baking, Eddie had arrived. "Hey guys, I got the stuff!" Chris squealed, "hurry, dad, I wanna decorate my snowman!"  After about an hour of eating and decorating, Chris was put to bed a little past his bedtime. Buck was still in the kitchen, washing dishes because they didn't clean up while they worked. "Buck, thanks for doing this tonight," Eddie said, leaning against the door frame. "Yeah, of course, no problem. You know I love hanging out with Chris." Eddie walked over to the sink, "let me help you out." Buck sat down at the kitchen table with a tired sigh after they finished, "next time, let's not bake cookies from scratch. It's more stressful than rescuing people from burning buildings ." He joked, and Eddie chuckled. He loved making Eddie laugh. "Do you want a drink?" Eddie asked, pulling out a bottle of wine from the cabinet. "Yes, please," Buck said. Eddie handed him a full glass, and they walked over to the couch. "I'm glad we have these two days off. Last year was a bit of a bummer," Buck stated. "You did an amazing job with the surprise Christmas dinner last year. It was super sweet." Eddie said. Buck blushed, "it was nothing." They were lying on their backs on Eddie's living room floor, Buck's head resting on Eddie's chest. Neither of them dared to move; they wanted to stay like this, however long it would last. Moments like this started happening more often, where they would hold each other or touch on another as if they were together. They kept talking and drinking and time flew by. By now, they were drunk and having conversations about their childhood Christmases. "I remember when I was a senior in high school, my parents forgot about Christmas for like, the third year in a row. They were too busy trying to sell the house," Buck said. "They were always too busy for Maddie and me. But always had time to go to some stupid work event."  Eddie ran his fingers through Buck's hair. He stayed quiet, trying to figure out the most comforting to say.Buck sighed, "I'm sorry; I'm treating you like a therapist." "No, you're not," Eddie said. "Yes, I am. You don't even care," Buck stated. Eddie held Buck's chin, gently turning his face so he could look at him. "No, don't say that. I care about what you have to say." There was a moment of silence, and they just stared into each other's eyes. "I want to make you feel safe and heard." Eddie realized he was still holding Buck's face, nearly caressing it. Eddie wanted to kiss him so badly, but they were drunk, and he had no idea how Buck felt. "Eddie," was all Buck could mutter. His heart raced, he hopped Eddie couldn't feel it. Buck was just drunk enough to lean in, just a little. He hoped Eddie got the hint, but his hand let go. "It's already late. Maybe we should get some sleep; we've got a busy day tomorrow." Eddie suggested. Buck's heart sank. "Yeah, you're right," Buck sighed and slowly sat up. Words couldn't explain how stupid he felt; he couldn't believe he thought Eddie would feel the same way. "Goodnight," Eddie said, quickly exiting the living room, leaving Buck with the stupid wine bottle and glasses. ---Eddie woke up the next morning feeling like an idiot. How could he just leave like that, Eddie wondered? Last night's memories were hitting him like a wave, the conversations, how close they were, how drunk they were, Buck's head on his chest. He let his mind wander, thinking about all the things he and Buck will never have together. His alarm went off, disrupting Eddie's thoughts. It was only six-thirty, and Chris wasn't going to be awake for another hour and a half. And Buck was still here, but he didn't want to face him. He didn't want to ruin the perfect memory of last night with reality. Eddie tested the waters with a "u up" text and immediately cringed. "Yea, wanna make breakfast together?" was what Buck sent back. Eddie grinned at the reader like a child. He skipped out of bed and quickly brushed his teeth. "Hey, Merry Christmas," Buck said. His beaming smile made Eddie's heart skip a beat. "Merry Christmas," Eddie said. He looked at the kitchen counter; it was already a mess." Why does my kitchen look like this," Eddie asked. "Because I was looking for bacon," Buck said. Eddie rubbed his temple, "I don't have any bacon." "Oh," Buck giggled, and Eddie couldn't help but laugh too. "Let's just make pancakes," Buck suggested. After putting everything back into the fridge, they began working. Buck knew he was the better cook between the two, and things would've gone a lot faster he did it himself, but he loved doing things with Eddie. "How come mine keeps ending up like that," Eddie asked. They were both standing over separate burners, cooking the pancake mix. "Because you're holding it wrong, lean the pan a bit," Buck instructed. "Like this," Eddie asked. He was still holding it wrong. Buck hesitated for a moment before walking behind Eddie and snaking his hand over Eddie's. "Like that," Eddie asked. "Yeah, like that, Buck assured.  Buck's chest was pressed against Eddie's back. It was just like the night; they didn't mention how close they were to each other; they just enjoyed it. They were on their last pancake. "Good job," was all that Buck could say. He didn't want to make it weird, but this whole situation was strange. He wanted to be with his best friend, who had a kid and was married a few years ago. Buck let go of his hand and walked back over to his burner.  —- It was New Year’s Eve, and Eddie was replaying those two days in his head over and over again, trying to figure what he did wrong. Buck had been distant for a week, only a few conversations at work. “See you guys tonight,” Bobby said as they exited the firehouse. “Captain Maddie and I can only be there for an hour. We don’t wanna be away from the baby for too long,” Chimney informed. “Yeah, Mia is the same way. So I’ll also be leaving early, Hen stated. “No worries, guys,” Bobby said. “But you two will be there all night right,” Bobby asked. “Yeah, you bet, Cap,” Buck said. “Yeah, Chris and I be there all night.  He’s going through a don’t tell me when to go to sleep phase,” Eddie said. They all chuckled, said their goodbyes, and entered their cars. —-Eddie arrived with Chris on time, and the party was already in full swing. Their coworkers, family, and friends were there. “Hey Eddie, hi Chris,” Athena greeted them at the door Harry by her side. “Do you wanna play video games in my room with Denny and me,” Harry asked. Chris turned to look at Eddie, “go ahead. Be safe.” Eddie said, and the boys went off. “What’s been going on between you and Buck,” Athena asked. “Nothing’s wrong, we’re fine,” Eddie lied. Athena raised her eyebrow, “you two are usually joined at the hip, but you came here alone.” “Wow, those detective skills are top-notch,” Eddie joked, but she didn’t laugh. “Buck has been on the phone with Bobby every day, asking him for advice about you. It’s interfering with my life, so please just apologize so I can sleep peacefully,” Athena said. “But that’s the thing. There wasn’t a fight; he just stopped talking to me. I don’t know why,” Eddie explains. “You don’t know why you’re best friend is upset,” Athena asked. Eddie thought about last week for the hundredth time. Did Buck have a problem with how close they were? Did he make him uncomfortable? “Maybe I do know why,” Eddie said. —- "Hey, there you are," Buck heard Eddie say. Eddie had been searching for Buck almost all night. He was sitting on a swing bench in the backyard of Athena and Bobby's house. Eddie stood a few feet away from him as if he was terrified to go near him. "Yeah, here I am," Buck muttered. There was so much Buck wanted to say but said nothing at all. "Can I sit next to you," Eddie asked. Buck nodded, and Eddie walked over and sat down. "Did I do something wrong," Eddie asked, breaking the silence. A look of confusion swiped Buck's face. "No, of course not," Buck said. "Then why are you telling Bobby that we're fighting," Eddie asked, a little annoyed. "I never told him we were fighting; I told him that I messed up our friendship," Buck said. Now Eddie was beyond annoyed, "why would you say that. How could you have ruined our friendship?" There was a long pause. Eddie was sick of the silence."Because... I have feelings for you," Buck confessed, "and we can't be friends if I like you. It's just too weird." He couldn't even look at Eddie while he said this. "Evan, look at me," Eddie begged softly, "please." Buck scanned Eddie's face trying to figure out what he would say next. Eddie's eyes were watery, but Buck couldn't tell if it was because of the cold wind or if he was upset. Eddie held Buck's face, and Buck nearly melted. "I have a feeling for you too," Eddie stated, his voice a little shaky. And just like that, Buck was crashing his lips onto Eddie's. Everything they've ever wanted to say to one another was spoken at that moment. Eddie's hand found their way to Buck's hair, and Buck was holding on to Eddie's waist for dear life. They heard the New Year’s countdown starting, and Eddie pulled away. “Maybe we should join everyone,” Eddie suggested. Buck groaned, “fine.” They shared one last kiss and walked back into the party. A new year, a fresh start to their relationship.

[malecsecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, moonlight-breeze-44!

For @moonlight-breeze-44. I took a few of your prompts, including angst, hurt/comfort, self-harming Alec and if you squint: sleepy cuddles, fluff and found family feels. I hope you enjoy it!!

Warning: self-harm

Read On AO3

*****

I am enough

“What are you doing to find our missing children?” Meliorn stares Alec down across the table. “Two faerie children have gone missing in the past week.”

“We’re investigating the situation. We’re in the process of gathering evidence and witness statements.” Alec reports.

“What about the three missing werewolf children? Maia inquires. “Have you made any progress on figuring out who took them?”

Alec shakes his head no. “Not yet. We had a lead - one of the witnesses reported seeing someone watching the children a few days before the abductions. We looked into it, but it’s not him. He's a mundane. He wouldn’t have been able to see the children, far less take him.”

Maia takes a breath to calm herself and leans back in her chair.

Before she can reply, Raphael speaks up. “A second newborn vampire went missing two nights ago. We filled out your reports. Have you found anything yet?”

Again Alec shakes his head no. “We are investigating, Raphael. I have shadowhunters going over the reports and searching security footage.”

“Shouldn’t you have shadowhunters on the ground, looking for witnesses?” Raphael inquires.

Magnus watches as Alec takes a moment to formulate his answer. Unlike the other downworlders, Magnus knows the pressure Alec is feeling from the Clave. The Clave does not care about downworlder children and does not want Alec ‘interfering with downworlder businesses.’ It angers him to no end, that the Clave is trying to stop Alec from helping the downworlders by putting pressure on him to improve the Institute’s patrols and demon kills.

“I will. The team gathering evidence for the Seelie abductions is nearly finished. It shouldn’t take more than a day. They already have instructions to take on the Vampire abduction case.” Alec replies.

“Hold on, you have an entire Institute full of hundreds of shadowhunters, and you can only spare a single team?” Raphael sounds incredulous.

Alec struggles to respond to that. “The Clave doesn’t approve of the Institute facilitating these investigations.”

“The Clave doesn’t approve?” Maia snaps “there are children missing! Three werewolf children have gone missing in the past week. Children! If it was shadowhunter children, the Clave would have spared no expense.”

Magnus watches as Alec digs his nails into his hand. He knows from earlier conversations that Alec agrees with them, but the Clave is giving Alec unreasonable standards, leaving him little time. Magnus knows that Alec has his best people -including himself- working to find the children, but the Institute is spread too thin.

Magnus wants to cover Alec’s hands with his own and stop him from hurting himself. But he can’t, because Alec had asked him here as High Warlock of Brooklyn, and not his boyfriend.

“Maia, I’m doing the best I can. I-”

“I agree with Maia, Shadowhunter. A single team of what, five shadowhunters? Out of the hundreds you have here isn’t enough. It’s the bare minimum! Raphael snaps.

“Investigative teams consists of twelve shadowhunters-”

“-big difference-” Raphael snarls under his breath.

“- and I’m trying to allocate more shadowhunters but we’re spread too thin. The Institute has many roles. We’re constantly closing smaller rifts - which show up more often than you assume, we consistently have have a minimum of 10 shadowhunter patrols out and a third of my shadowhunters are attending a conference in Idris-”

“- We get it, shadowhunter.” Meliorn interrupts. “You’re busy with your shadowhunter business, and downworlder business must take a backseat.”

“No, that’s not-” Alec takes a breath before continuing. “Right now, finding the missing children is my first priority. But I also report to the Clave so I can’t neglect my other duties.”

“There have been five downworlder abductions in the past week!” Maia slams her fist down on the table. “This should be your only priority, shadowhunter!”

There’s a chime as Magnus receives a notification on his phone. Magnus looks up and clears his throat. “Six abductions. I just received word that a warlock was taken. He’s 18 years old, which is still adolescent considering warlock lifespans.”

“Six abductions, and nothing,” Raphael sneers, “perhaps if the seventh was a shadowhunter child then you’d take this case seriously?”

Meliorn gestures around himself. “I thought these downworld cabinet meetings were a step in the right direction. But now it seems like they only serve to inform you of downworld activities.”

Alec looks pained. “That’s not-”

Maia stands up. “I’ve had enough of this. We’re wasting time. Since you are either incapable or not willing to find the children, I’m taking this into my own hands. And if a shadowhunter is responsible or even involved, Accords be damned.”

Maia walks out. Raphael nods in agreement, and follows her out of the room. “The least you can do is to stay out of our way, Lightwood.”

Alec flinches, and then drops his head into his knuckles. Magnus can see his nails biting into his skin. It’s a sadly familiar habit, one that Magnus sees more than he’d like.

Aside from Magnus and Alec, the room is empty. Magnus reaches across the table for Alec’s hand, but as soon as his fingers make contact, Alec flinches away and stands.

Magnus reaches out, worried. He knows how hard Alec is taking this case, and how much the lack of leads is weighing on Alec. “Alexander-”

Alec abruptly stands up, taps his tablet and hands it to Magnus without meeting his eyes. “Can you fill out this report for the missing warlock? I need to rendez-vous with Underhill and see if his team got anything from the last potential abduction site.”

Magnus takes the tablet and steps closer to Alec, who takes two steps away. “Alec-”

“I’m busy, I need to go look-”

Magnus recognizes this particular behavior in Alec, and it hurts that Alec is fleeing from him. He takes a quick step forward and grabs Alec’s hands. “I know you’re working hard on this. I know how hard the Clave is working against you. You’ll find them. I believe in you.”

Alec meets his eyes for a moment. Magnus is taken back by the emotions he sees swirling in Alec’s glassy eyes. Despair, self-hatred and a steely determination to make it right.

Alec looks away, touches Magnus’s hand gently and then pulls away before walking towards the exit.

“I’ll see you at the loft tonight?”

There’s a pause in Alec’s step. He nods, and then exits.

Magnus takes it as a yes.

~~~

Alec doesn’t show up.

It hurts but Magnus gets it. Alec is under a lot of pressure and stress, from both the Clave and the downworld and his own desire to rescue the children before harm befalls them.

Staying at the institute was probably a better choice. Alec would be able to handle the investigation faster there, as opposed to Magnus’s loft, despite Magnus’s ability to portal. The notion that every second counts is well proven, after all.

Magnus just wishes that he’d got the chance to talk to Alec, and ease some of the self-hatred out of him. The downworld cabinet was correct, but they didn’t have the full picture, not like Magnus and Alec.

Magnus goes to bed alone, deciding to portal to the Institute tomorrow at noon to check on Alec. He imagines that Izzy, or Alec’s friend, Underhill would talk to Alec and ease some of his guilt and stress.

He flicks his fingers and sends a ‘good night Alec’ text to Alec. Magnus closes his eyes and falls asleep, hoping but not expecting to receive a reply from Alec. Magnus knows his boyfriend.

He doesn’t receive a reply.

~~~

Alec doesn’t message Magnus in the morning either. In fact, Magnus’s phone remains void of any communication from Alec, until eleven thirty.

Delighted that Alec is reaching out, Magnus picks up the call with a cheerful, “Good morning Alexander!”

“Magnus, do you have anything that belongs to the missing warlock,” Alec presumably looks down at the report for the warlock’s name, “Mathias?”

Magnus frowns as Alec gets straight to business. “No. I could get something from his flat. You want me to run a trace on it?”

“Yeah. I know the other possessions were blocked from the tracking spell, but I-we need to cover all our bases.”

Magnus hums in agreement. Alec sounds stressed and tired, as if he didn’t sleep. Magnus wonders how to broach the subject without scaring Alec off.

“You didn’t come by the loft last night,” Magnus says lightly. “Chairman Meow missed his morning head scratches.”

“I-Magnus.” Alec says, He sounds exhausted, and Magnus feels for him. “I’m sorry-”

“It’s okay.” Magnus says quickly. “Take care of yourself. And if there’s anything that I can help you with…”

“I’ll let you know.” Alec promises, and Magnus hears the truth in it.

“I’ll let Madzie know you say ‘hi’?”

“Madzie? Wait- dammit.” Alec swears as he remembers they were supposed to pick her up and babysit.

“Alec-”

There’s some static in the background. “I need to go.”

Magnus sighs and says “Alright, bye.” but the line is already dead. He checks his phone, and realizes that he doesn’t have enough time to check on Alec at the institute if he wants to get to Mathias’s apartment and run the trace before picking up Madzie.

Magnus portals to the closest spot to Mathias’s apartment that he’s been to, and starts walking.

~~~

Angry tears slip out of Catarina’s eyes and dark blue magic escapes from her hands uncontrollably as she talks to Magnus.

It’s identical to a typical mundane child-kidnapping case.

The parent or guardian looks away for just a moment in a large, busy area, just long enough for the child to run away or for someone to grab them, and in a second the child is gone.

However, Madzie is no mundane. And the way Catarina’s frantic tracking spells have been blocked is no coincidence.

Madzie is the seventh abduction victim.

Magnus is just as angry and scared. He views the downworld as his extended family, the younger souls he takes care of and places under his protection. But Madzie… when Magnus was with Madzie and Alec it didn’t feel like extended family.

It felt like his immediate family. His adopted daughter, or rather niece and his significant other. He wanted to help raise her, and be there for her the way a father would.

Magnus loves Madzie.

And now she’s gone.

Magnus carefully pulls Catarina towards him, and runs a soothing hand on her back. “Hey look at me.” Magnus tilts Catarina’s head up, and they make eye contact. “I promise we’ll find her.” Magnus infuses a bit of magic into his words.

Catarina nods, and the magic stops leaking out of her hands.

Magnus steps away from her, opens a portal up to the institute and steps through.

~~~

Magnus steps out of the portal, right in front of the massive church doors to the institute. He knocks, and waits a moment before Underhill, Alec’s friend opens them.

“Magnus.” Underhill says. Magnus detects a note of relief in his voice. “I’m glad you came. Hopefully you can help Alec.”

Magnus nods tightly, and follows Underhill to the ops center where he spots Alec talking to Izzy in front of a map of New York.

“Alec.” It’s not often that Magnus uses this serious tone without any flirtation or sarcasm, and it never fails to grab the recipient’s attention. “We need to talk.”

Alec looks at him for a second, and then leads Magnus to his office.

Magnus closes the door behind him.

“Magnus, what is it?”

“It’s Madzie.”

Alec freezes. The knowledge that Madzie is in danger freezes him in place. Magnus can see the moment Alec realizes what happened, by the terrified look in his eyes. Neither of them move.

“She’s been taken.”

Magnus sees Alec curl his nails into his hands and absently wonders, how many times has Alec done that since he saw him yesterday? How many times has Alec done that since they spoke at noon?

Magnus recounts how Catarina was waiting with Madzie to give her to Magnus to babysit, and how Magnus ran slightly late. How Catarina had looked away for just a moment, and Madzie was lost. How Catarina’s tracking spells were blocked, just like the rest.

As he talks, Alec’s knuckles grow whiter and whiter as he digs his nails into his palms and the softer sides of his fingers. It’s only when Magnus finishes speaking that Alec unfolds his hands, and Magnus sees blood.

“Alec,” Magnus whispers, reaching for Alec’s hands. “I know how you’re feeling but you can’t do this to yourself.”

He cradles Alec’s hands in his own, and feels sick as he sees all the crescent scars, some of them already starting to heal, others still bleeding. There must’ve been at least fifteen on each hand. Magnus’s heart breaks.

He summons his magic to heal them, but Alec yanks his hands back.

“It doesn’t matter how I feel.” Alec reaches up and tugs on his hair, painfully. "I-we need to find her. Them. Now.”

Magnus studies Alec worriedly and steps closer. He stands inches away from Alec, and gently takes both of Alec’s hands, unwinding the one in Alec’s hair.

“Your feelings, your emotions always matter, Alec.” Magnus whispers. “But hurting yourself isn't fixing anything. Where’s your stress ball?”

Wordlessly Alec steps back and opens one of the drawers in his desk. Magnus peers inside and sees Alec’s stress ball in pieces. It’s covered in indents and large tears, presumably from Alec’s fingernails. It’s almost unrecognizable.

“I tried using it instead,” Alec says, stilted. “But…”

“... But a mundane stress ball can’t hold up against a shadowhunter.” Magnus finishes, and Alec nods looking away.

Magnus twirls his fingers, and bright blue magic surrounds the destroyed stress ball, repairing and assembling it. When it’s done, Magnus picks it up. “I’ll see what I can do to make it shadowhunter proof. In the meantime, maybe you should consider trying some of the other coping mechanisms we talked about? Like holding the ice block, or drawing on yourself with a soft-tipped pen?

It feels like years pass (and Magnus would know) before Alec nods in agreement.

“Thank you.” Magnus steps closer to Alec and gently grasps his hands again. Magnus sees the dark bags under Alec’s eyes, and smells the scent of coffee on his breath. He puts the pieces together.

“You didn’t sleep at all, did you?” Magnus asks, deliberately keeping his voice soft.

Alec looks away, and tries to tug his hands out of Magnus’s grip, but Magnus keeps hold of them.

“Talk to me, Alec. I know you're hurting. Let me help.”

Slowly, Alec gives Magnus the slowest of nods.

Magnus summons his magic, and in a moment all the crescent cuts on Alec’s hands are gone. Magnus lifts both of Alec’s palms up, and gently kisses them before letting them go. He gently grasps Alec’s head, and slides his thumb on Alec’s cheek. The dull pain and faint ringing that comes with pulling an all-nighter disappears and Alec leans on Magnus, arms wrapping around him tightly. He’s shaking.

Magnus returns the hug protectively.

“I can’t - I can’t find them, I can’t, Magnus. I tried, but that’s not good enough.” Alec sobs, words half-muffled against Magnus’s shoulder.

“I’m trying but there’s nothing and the Clave is pulling me in a dozen different directions and I haven’t found anything to give to the cabinet and it’s been two weeks since the first child was taken. Two weeks, Magnus. And I’m still at step one. I- I don’t even know if the kids are even alive and now Madzie-”

Alec lets out a heartbreaking sob.

“-I can’t - I can’t even think of what might happen to her, Magnus. If I’d just been there, maybe she wouldn’t have been taken, or if I was better, I would’ve gotten something-” Alec shudders. “It’s my fault - it's my fault she’s gone. I should - I should’ve been there.”

“I’m not good enough.” Alec cries, and shakes in Magnus’s arms.

Magnus pulls back just enough so that he can look Alec in the eye. “Alec, sweetheart, you are good enough. You are one of the best men I’ve ever known.”

Alec looks away.

“And I know you don’t believe me right now, but it's true. But let me convince you of this. These abductions are not your fault. I see how much effort and time you’re putting into finding them. I know you’re doing everything you can, Alec. This is not your fault.”

Alec nods, and holds onto Magnus.

“And this isn’t your sole burden to bear. You have an entire institute, and the High Warlock of Brooklyn at your fingertips. We’re all willing. Let us help you, Alec. You don’t have to spread yourself so thin.”

"Let me take care of you." Magnus whispers, pleading.

Slowly Alec nods, and Magnus hugs him again, tilting his head to lean against Alec’s.

Alec hugs him back tightly, trembling in his arms. Magnus adjusts an arm to rub Alec’s back comfortingly as Alec cries. He can feel a spot on his shoulder growing increasingly damp. It’s heartbreaking to hear, but Magnus knows Alec needs this. Magnus knows from first hand experience that while crying generally doesn’t solve the problem, it’s a necessary emotional release.

Magnus also knows that as head of the Institute, Alec wouldn’t let any of the shadowhunters under his care see him so vulnerable. It occurs to Magnus that the previous heads of the Institute, Maryse and Robert, were the same way. Every time he saw them, Maryse and Robert spoke in strict, controlled tones. Magnus can’t recall them showing any other emotion than anger, on a few rare occasions. He suddenly doubts they would have instructed Alec on dealing with the stress, other than ignoring it.

“It’s okay to cry, Alec.” Magnus reassures. “I don’t know what your parents or the Clave tell you, but every leader feels this way when the situation arises. I did, quite frequently when Valentine was around. Feeling this way doesn’t make you weak, or not good enough. It makes you human.”

Magnus’s words seem to get through to Alec. Slowly enough, Magnus feels the tremors from Alec ease, and his nearly painful grip on Magnus eases into something more comfortable. After a few moments, Alec lets go and wipes his face. He clears his throat and glances at Magnus.

“Thanks,” Alec offers Magnus a small smile. “I think I needed that.”

Magnus laughs lightly and hums in agreement. “How do you feel now?”

“Better,” Alec replies, “I’m still worried about Madzie and the others but it’s not…”

“... overwhelming?” Magnus guesses, from experience.

“Yeah, exactly.” Alec smiles, before giving Magnus a considering look. “Can we do a scene? I want to stop thinking about the case and get out of my head for a bit.”

Magnus gives Alec a teasing, playful smile. “You want to lock me up?”

“Actually I was wondering if I could, uh, sub for you?” Alec asks, slightly nervously. Magnus can see the tips of his ears turning red.

“I’d love that. But are you sure?” Magnus verifies. “It’s usually the other way around.”

“I’m sure.” Alec smiles reassuringly. “I’ll let you know if I don’t like anything, or if I want to stop.”

Magnus smiles, reaches up and slides his thumb across Alec’s cheek. “Good. We won’t do much today, you’re pretty tired.”

Magnus waits for the ‘okay,’ from Alec before starting. “Go tell Isabelle that there’s been another abduction, and Catarina and I will leave the reports on her desk shortly. Tell her that you’re going to take a few hours, and then come back to help.”

Alec nods. “Okay.”

“Meet me in your room when you’re done.”

Alec nods, and Magnus smiles and kisses him before letting him leave.

Magnus exits the office after Alec and makes his way to Alec’s room. It’s hardly the first time he’s been here, and no-one stops him in entering.

Inside Alec has case files, papers and photographs spread over his bed. With a flick of his wrist, Magnus packs it up neatly and sends it to Alec’s office table.

He pulls off his outer jacket and shoes, and sits down, leaning on the headboard to wait for Alec.

Magnus doesn’t have to wait long. Alec appears in the doorway. He walks in and shuts the door behind him.

Magnus stands up and walks towards Alec. He plucks the tablet out of Alec’s hands, and sends it to Alec’s office. Then he raises his hands to Alec’s shoulders, and slides Alec’s jacket off.

With a flick of his wrist, Magnus summons soft sweatpants. He hands it to Alec.

“Go get changed, sweetheart.”

Alec nods, takes the clothes and disappears into the small washroom on the other side of the room. Not a minute later, he reappears wearing the clothes Magnus gave him. Some of the previous tension has disappeared, and Alec’s eyes only hold a glimmer of red indicating he was just crying. Magnus steps closer to Alec and kisses him. He places his hands on Alec’s back, holding him in place and feeling a bit more of the tension fade.

Eventually Magnus pulls back. “It’s comfortable?” Magnus asks to make sure.

Alec nods. “It’s soft.” There’s a contented hum from Alec. “I like it. Thank you.”

Magnus smiles. “Good.” He gestures to the bed behind him. “Go lie down on your stomach at the edge of the bed.”

Alec looks slightly confused, but he complies anyway. Magnus stands beside the bed, pulls off his rings, flicks his wrists and massage oil immediately covers his hands. He starts kneading Alec’s shoulders.

“Is this okay?”

Alec melts into the bed, and makes a muffled affirming sound.

Magnus smiles and continues. He watches as Alec slowly melts into the sheets, as the sensation of Magnus’s hands on his back takes over his focus, pushing his other thoughts away. Magnus watches Alec’s eyes close, and after a few minutes Magnus can tell that Alec reaches the line between relaxed and drowsy. “Go to sleep, sweetheart.”

Alec twists his head to the side to look at Magnus. “Will you stay?” He asks, sleep already drifting into his voice making it soft.

Magnus doesn’t even have to think.

“Always.”

And just like that, nearly all the tension in Alec's muscles is gone. Magnus knows that they still have a long way to go, but this is a step in the right direction. When he's sure Alec is fast asleep, he pulls the blanket over Alec, and sits next to him leaning on the headboard.

With a flick of his wrist, the massage oil is gone. Magnus summons the first case file from Alec’s office and begins reviewing the details, while gently carding through Alec’s hair.

They’ll get through his. They have to.

~~~

Four stressful days later Magnus and Alec are standing inside an abandoned warehouse near the ocean surrounded by abducted downworlder children. There’s nearly fifty of them there, from all over the world judging by their clothing. Alec holds Magnus’s hand tightly as he directs the children over to the shadowhunters and downworlders to get medically checked out.

So far, they’ve found both missing fae children, one of the werewolves, the missing vampire and the elder warlock.

They haven’t seen Madzie yet, and Magnus can tell that Alec is getting antsy.

Suddenly, there’s a familiar cry. “Alec!”

Magnus turns in time to see Madzie barrel into Alec, clinging to him tightly. Alec picks up her and returns the fierce hug. Magnus can see lines of tension that even he had not been able to rid fading.

Magnus quickly sends a fire message to Catarina, telling her that they found Madzie and to meet them at the entrance of the warehouse.

Madzie pulls back from the hug and smiles at Alec. “I knew you’d find me!” Then she spots Magnus and starts wiggling, insisting to be held by Magnus as well.

Alec laughs wetly and hands her to Magnus.

“Sweet pea! I’m glad you’re alright.” Magnus smiles, and Madzie beams back at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Alec smile shakily and wipe a few stray tears away. Magnus switches to hold Madzie with one arm and pulls Alec into their hug with the other.

Finally, something in Magnus settles. His family is together, and safe again.

The End.

[dukeofonions]

Puppet vs Video Games (The Gimmicks of Sanders Sides)

If you’ve followed me for awhile (meaning the short amount of time I’ve been running this blog) then you’ll probably be aware of what my opinions are of the “gimmicks” that have been making themselves prevalent in recent Sanders Sides episodes. Now just to make things clear, almost every episode of Sanders Sides uses some kind of gimmick. 

Well, besides the first one, which consists entirely of talking with no added effects. 

And I, being the faceless entity that sits behind a computer screen judging an online web series, am going to rant about that because this is my blog and I do what I want. So let’s begin… 

The Prologue

As season one progresses we see things like location changes, a song, Thomas’ friends making several appearances, simple editing tricks (like putting text or pictures on a screen) minor costume changes (Logan and Patton dressing as Sherlock and Watson) split screen effects, and even an episode featuring an animated segment. 

At the end of Season One we were introduced to the concept of “Rooms” which added a whole new layer to the story and got people excited to see what the other rooms would entail. Still, up to this point, the gimmicks remained mostly in the background as small ways to sprinkle in some extra storytelling while the dialogue continued to be the main thing carrying the series. 

Then Season Two began with Fitting In, which featured a few more props that served to signify each of the Hogwarts houses. This made sense seeing as that was the focus of the video, and for fans of Harry Potter, it would be fun to see the characters wearing things from the different houses. 

After Fitting In, we got Moving On which featured the introduction of Patton’s room. Like with Virgil’s, a lot went into designing his room. There is a lot to look at, who knows how long it took to find all the stuff they showcased in the background? On top of that they also had the filter they used to give the room a dreamlike quality, and my favorite detail, the pictures that continue to change throughout the episode depending on what the characters are talking about. 

It remains one of my favorite set pieces from the series just from the amount of detail they put into it, and it felt like a step up from Virgil’s room (which I also love) and it makes me excited for the rest of the rooms that have yet to be revealed. 

However! I am not here to discuss the rooms. Even though I already did… 

After Moving On, however, is when things start to change with the series. 

During the 12 Days of Christmas, the Sides are each given their own custom Christmas sweaters, but that’s only part of the gimmick. The centerpiece for this episode is, of course, the song sung by all four Sides. This moment is pretty significant as it marks the first time all four of them appeared on screen together at the same time. 

This was just the tip of the iceberg for what was to come… 

Immediately following 12 Days we get Can Lying Be Good? Which featured a new location where the video spent the majority in, using quick cuts with the cameras to give off the illusion of Roman pretending to be Joan (including clever uses of audio) and of course, Deceit himself. The makeup and costume was unlike anything we’d seen in the series yet. Throw in some more split screen to show two Sides on screen together, as well as some clever costume choices for character Thomas, makes this episode (in my opinion) the best at utilizing its effects and filming techniques to tell its story. 

And then, things start to shift again…. 

The next episode we get is Why Do We Get Out Of Bed In The Morning? Which took some time to produce, coming out in April after CLBG? Was released in February. Still, good time considering what was to come. 

This episode had some mixed reviews once it finally came out, but I plan on tackling that later. The reason this episode (which was really just a longer, drawn out version of Losing My Motivation but starring Logan and Roman) was the use of animations. 

For Logan, his arguments were displayed via “Stop Motion” writings of graphs and charts which he used to explain his points. And from a short behind the scenes video, each of these were drawn by hand and took hours to make. From what I understand, all of Roman’s bits were animated on a computer, though I don’t have much info on how they were made. 

Within the episode, these different types of animations were used to help Roman and Logan illustrate their points. And while on their own they’re quite adorable, they aren’t necessary for the telling of this story. One thing this episode was criticised for was how the writing felt off. Everything seemed rushed and none of the characters felt in character, and while I don’t recall anyone outright saying it, it’s likely that perhaps the team felt pressured to get this video out on time, and thus might have skipped out on other elements in order to make up for the time spent working on the animations. 

Whether that was writing the script, filming, or editing, we don’t know. All I know is that the general consensus for this episode was that it was just okay. As a Logan and Roman fan though, it was kinda disappointing for their first episode with them taking the spotlight together to just be viewed as “okay” and isn’t a favorite of mine. 

Things picked up a little after Crofters: The Musical was released only a few days after WDWGOOBITM (that title is a monster to type no matter how ya do it) and it featured a song as its gimmick. The mood was a bit lighter, we got to see Logan having fun, and hey we even got our first main Roman angst foreshadowing! Good thing that wouldn’t be dragged out for several episodes, right?

All in all, things were definitely looking up for Sanders Sides. From the looks of it, we were going to start getting more frequent updates! 

Then the Drought happened and we had to wait almost six months for a new episode. 

At least that would be the longest we ever had to wait for something. 

Before I get into the beef of this post I wanna bring up three more episodes, Embarrassing Phases, Selfishness vs Selflessness, and Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts. 

Like the other episodes throughout Season Two, each of these episodes have different gimmicks. In Embarrassing Phases, it’s the Halloween costumes. In SVS, it’s a location change plus costume change, and in DWIT we get the introduction of Remus along with a musical number and a few props. 

I’d say each of these episodes does a good job at incorporating their gimmicks into the story. Embarrassing Phases involves them talking about Halloween and using costumes as metaphors or something like that (This may be one of the few times I say something positive about this episode don’t get used to it)

With SVS, thanks to some clever acting, we can see Janus get the idea of using the courtroom scenario to try and get his point across. He first does this by suggesting that Thomas may not be as innocent as he seems, and after Patton defends him, that’s when Janus switches to the courtroom in order to put Patton to the test and literally defend Thomas as a lawyer. 

Then in DWIT, given that Remus is a very outgoing character, it makes sense that he’d use a song to explain who he is and make a dramatic entrance. Plus, the series has used songs before so it’s not surprising to see this here. And seeing as Remus is creativity, it’s only fitting that he’s able to conjure random things throughout the episode. Okay, that was a long prologue, onto the actual reason most of you  probably clicked on this post. Part One: The Puppets

Learning New Things About Ourselves also does a good job of handling its gimmick and incorporating it into the story. Like the three I just mentioned, there’s a set up and a pay off. We get an idea of what’s to come with this moment: 

“I don’t feel content,” 

“With my content.” 

Which is obviously a reference to some random children’s educational program (most likely Sesame Street) by showcasing how two words that are spelled the same can have different meanings. Great now I sound like some educational children’s program. 

Then later on, we get the actual set up that comes from Thomas becoming frustrated that he can’t figure out what the problem is that’s causing this whole dilemma. He says, “We’ve got an issue. Something that I’m not aware of yet, something that may be unlocked with the right question. This is like...  fundamental learning!”

After he says that, he gets an idea and asks the others how he used to learn things and each one responds accordingly: 

Logan: Textbooks! 

Roman and Virgil: Mistakes. 

Patton: Puppets! 

And of course, initially, Thomas questions this and no one really understands what Patton means by this. But he explains and makes a case for it, “Thomas used to learn all kinds of new and helpful things from puppets when he was younger! Like how to count and his ABCs. Maybe it’ll be easier to work through issues when puppets are involved.” 

We see Thomas consider the idea, and then Logan sets up a joke with him saying Thomas has outgrown that kind of stuff only to have him express his love for the idea. 

After that, the Sides (excluding Logan) change into their respective puppets and continue on the episode. 

One important thing to note (which I will bring up later) is that this scene takes place around the 15 minute mark. At least by that point, everyone except Logan has changed into a puppet. With the video being 38 minutes long, this is about halfway through the episode, and by the 31 minute mark the Sides begin turning back to normal. 

Which means the puppets roughly take up only about 15 minutes of the video, slightly longer if you count Logan’s puppet, but you get the idea. 

Also I’m bad at math so if I got this wrong sue me. There’s a reason I’m sitting here writing this instead of doing something with my life.

From then on, the conversation continues with everyone still trying to figure out what the question they need to be asking is. Of course, plenty of references to other educational kid shows are thrown around, but that now makes sense seeing as they’re fully embracing the puppet idea. Patton furthers the conversation along by finally getting Thomas to start asking “Why” and uses another reference to do so, which starts the next part of the conversation and brings us the next major conflict in this episode, Logan.

He gives his opinion, stating that no one takes Thomas seriously and that he should switch careers in order to obtain that status instead of devoting his time to making silly videos. 

This of course, causes dissension within the group, and leads to Roman once again insulting Logan before realizing that he’s been going too far. After being prompted to apologize, Roman attempts to express his feelings to Logan and say sorry, but it doesn’t exactly help him feel any better which is when Patton suggests he try a different way.

And, Roman being Roman, decides the best way to do this is through song. A song that’s reminiscent of those one might hear on Sesame Street (there’s probably others but I’m rolling with this one) so it fits with the puppet thing. Again, it’s justified. 

The episode ends with Logan finally understanding where the others are coming from and Thomas finding the right question to ask, which he is able to answer and it solves the dilemma. 

Logan turns into a puppet, there’s another Sesame Street reference, and Roman is finally gonna start addressing his issues! 

Good thing that won’t be brushed under a rug by the other characters for three more episodes right? 

All in all, in case you couldn’t tell, I adore this episode and it still remains one of my favorites to this day. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the references, which are used cleverly and in a fun way that also keeps the story moving along. The designs for the puppets are cute and match each of the characters, and the puppetry is amazing! 

Plus the song is an absolute bop and it still makes me emotional sometimes. 

Which begs the question, was the sixth month wait worth it? Well, after hearing all that went into making this episode and seeing the final result, I’d say it was worth it. 

It’s also nice that we got a behind the scenes video where we got to see the full story on how this episode was made and all the difficulties Thomas, Joan, and Talyn faced when trying to make it a reality. Did they need to use puppets? No, but what matters is that they were able to take the idea and incorporate it into a story in a way that was fun and felt justified for existing. 

Not saying this episode is perfect, there are a few problems here and there, but overall this remains one of my top Sanders Sides episodes and one I’ve watched repeatedly since it came out. 

Now that all that positive stuff is out of the way, let’s get to the fun part….

Part Two: The Video Games

I’m gonna be blunt, Putting Others First does not do as good of a job with incorporating video games into its story like LNTAO does. 

However, I can’t exactly talk about this episode without talking about the extremely long wait we had in between episodes. The last official episode (that follows the main storyline, so not Asides) came out on June 25, 2019. POF came out May 1st, 2020. 

Almost 10 months, the longest we’ve ever had to wait for an episode. And if you wanna go further, remember that POF was meant to be the follow up to SVS, a part two if you will, SVS came out March 31st 2019, so by the time POF came out, it had already been a year since this set up the conflict for wedding vs callback.

By that point, some people were no longer interested or as excited about the new episode, but that changed briefly when a trailer for the episode dropped after a new Bloopers video was released a few months before POF was finally released. 

Keep in mind that up until this point, we weren’t entirely sure what the hold up was for this episode. We’d only gotten the vague answer of “There’s a special sequence for this episode and we’re working with another artist in order to make it, which is why it’s taking so long.” 

Okay, fair enough, and the trailer revealed what exactly that sequence was, animation! 

Now I’ve already explained in another post why I have problems with how vague Thomas and co. are when it comes to giving information about upcoming videos, so I won’t get into that here. 

What I am going to bring up since it relates to some of my points is this, remember when they said it was a “special sequence” they were working on? Well, after the video is released we find that it isn’t one, but 10. 

I’m not counting each time a sequence was used (For example, the opening segment which is later followed by Roman imagining a different outcome in the same style or every single one of Logan’s low-down’s, and the two trolley problems are counted as one sequence for this post specifically) because I really don’t wanna go through and count every single time Logan popped up on screen, but tell me, why in the heckity heck did they feel it was necessary to include 10 of these animated segments? 

And okay, there’s actually 12 (maybe 13? The Pokemon reference uses two different styles) but why are there so many? How are they necessary and what is their reason for being in this episode? 

Remember earlier when I mentioned that the puppet stuff didn’t start until the 15 minute mark? Well, POF literally begins with a video game sequence, and then the game references just keep coming. The intro gets a retro remix along with the rest of the music, and once Thomas enters the picture his curse words are covered by a gold coin and the “mario coin” sound effect. 

And then, not even three minutes in, we get yet another video game sequence recapping the last episode, after we already had a recap of the last episode less than a minute ago! 

To be fair though Rhythm Redux is a bop and I’m not sure why they felt the need to include a “flashback” after the intro when they were going to include this song anyway since it does a better job at explaining things than the random shots and dialogue from SVS. 

With LNTAO, none of the “puppet bits” began until after the Sides changed into puppets, besides that one bit of foreshadowing with the “Content with my content” line. There was no change to the intro’s music, nothing besides that one bit to foreshadow the puppets coming into play. 

Another thing LNTAO does that POF doesn’t is establish a set up, and pay off for the video games. Right off the bat, we get the video games, then later we get Patton’s line about how “Life isn’t like one of your video games” just a few minutes before the next video game sequence takes place, which just felt out of place to me the first time I watched it and I felt like that line was put in there just to remind the audience “Oh yeah, this is a video game themed episode!” 

Which, okay, there actually was some bit of set up before this back in SVS. Thomas mentions that he planned to spend his time at the wedding playing “Word Crush” on his phone, then as POF begins, that’s exactly what he’s doing. 

And there are certain instances where the sequences work. 

The beginning sequence ties back into Thomas’ comment from SVS and, in a way, sets up the video game thing (even if it does make me somewhat cringe but that’s mostly Lee and Mary Lee’s characters) and I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with how “Rhythm Redux” was incorporated if they hadn’t included the flash back after the intro. Again, why did they need two different recaps? They only needed one and it did a good job of explaining everything on its own. 

I will also say the Trolley Segments work due to the discussions being held, they’re talking about “Morality” so why wouldn’t you bring up one of the oldest moral dilemmas out there? It also ties in with my favorite part of the video, the “Final Boss” fight with Lilypadton vs Janus. I was not expecting it, and adding Janus’ reveal on top of that just made everything even better. It was dramatic, and I loved how the health bars that were used for Patton and Janus changed to represent Thomas’ deteriorating mental health. 

All in all, there was potential here with the video game theme, and there were scenes where it was used well. But all the others that I didn’t mention? They just felt forced and out of place to me and honestly, took me out of the moment. 

Another episode I want to compare POF to is Logic vs Passion (I am not typing either the title or the acronym out again) where they both incorporate their gimmicks in a similar way. 

Logan and Roman both use their respective animations to illustrate their points of view, and throughout POF all the characters use different video games to illustrate their own points. 

The issues I have with these episodes is that these conversations could have been had without the use of any of these things. The Sides have had discussions and used examples to elaborate their points in the past without the use of visuals. 

Now, can visuals help with storytelling? Yes, and I mentioned several instances where POF does this. But honestly, the whole video game theme seemed out of place for this particular video. Compare it to SVS which only had a location change, the episode focused almost entirely on its dialogue and still manages to be dramatic and engaging. You can easily follow along with the discussion without the need for fancy visuals. 

With POF, it seems like they just try to rush from one video game reference to the next, leaving little room to breathe in between before another video game is thrown into your face. What could have been a simple discussion like in SVS (which still managed to balance humor with its more serious themes) we got a rather bloated middle section which, honestly, I don’t remember much about. 

I’ve watched the video several times and without fail, I always find myself spacing out throughout a good chunk of the middle until the whole Lilypadton scene takes place. That’s when I became interested, especially when Janus entered the picture to bring in his points and act as a bit of an “anti-hero” in the whole thing. 

I simply believe this video could have been a lot simpler, and probably more cohesive if they’d left a lot of the video game stuff out. The last thing I want to be when consuming any type of media is bored, and honestly if it wasn’t for me making all these analysis posts on the episode, I probably wouldn’t have watched it again save for my favorite parts. 

Not only that, but we waited 10 months for this episode because of the video game sequences, and again you have to ask yourself, was the wait worth it? 

I have to say, unlike with LNTAO, it wasn’t worth it to me. They could take the video game sequences out altogether (even my favorite ones) and I wouldn’t really care. This episode just doesn’t need them, they don’t justify their use in this episode. Whereas in LNTAO, I love the use of puppets and if they were to be taken out, I would miss them. 

Now is this to say I hate the episode? No, there’s actually a lot I like about it. Patton’s development, Janus, and the ending with Roman are all amazing on their own. But really, who’s to say Janus couldn’t have confronted Patton in person instead of a video game world? 

Logan didn’t need to appear via little “Pop ups” and could have been called upon by Patton for help only to be brushed aside when what he says doesn’t help his case at all. Then when things start getting out of hand, “Logan” comes back to try to fix things but it doesn’t work, which is when he reveals himself only this time everyone, including the audience, fell for it because Janus has stepped up his game when it comes to disguising himself. 

Of course, the same could be said about LNTAO, they didn’t need to be puppets, right? Well, considering that the message of the episode was that you can use unconventional methods to express different ideas using different mediums, and Logan spent the whole time seeing the puppets at nothing but silly and childish only to come to this realization himself, it makes sense why puppets were used. 

However, you can actually apply that same message to POF, where they used an unconventional method to get their points across. 

The only problem, like with Logic vs Passion, was that the gimmicks alone couldn’t carry the episode. 

Logic vs Passion wasn’t as good as other episodes (and I may do a full review of this in the future) and in POF, it just felt like there was too much being crammed into this one episode. We went from discussing different types of morality and why people do good things to Janus suddenly beginning his “acceptance arc” with Roman having a breakdown at the end. Honestly, the point where Janus enters the conversation feels like a completely separate episode from what we’ve had thus far. Not only that, I have my own issues with how Janus’ character seemed to suddenly do a 180 (which I already talked about in another post) so while I love the ending scenes on their own, I admit that maybe they should have been handled differently. 

Of course, at the end of the day, all of this is just a matter of opinion. Lots of people loved the video game segments, and others didn’t like the puppets. Some people love all the gimmicks used in the videos, others wish for things to go back to the simpler formats of the older episodes and honestly, I agree. 

It seems like with every new episode the team is trying to outdo themselves and take things up another level each time, which is something I can admire, but it is something that can be overdone. Just look at Sanders Asides, it was supposed to be this simple little thing, but it might as well just be another episode. There’s nothing to distinguish it from any of the other main episodes, and if the rest of Asides is going to be the same way, then what’s the point of making it a separate series at all?

Now, Thomas and Joan have said that after this episode, they’re going to start using more practical effects and make things simpler, which I take as a sign of them learning to step back from all the gimmicks they use and just let the characters shine on their own for a while. Which, if that is the case, good on them. 

We don’t come to this series for the effects and flashy scenes, we come for the characters. They’re what we love and want to see more of. If you want more proof, just look at what people mostly took from POF, they took the character moments. It wasn’t the video game references that resonated the most with people, heck, people outright seemed to ignore the fact that Leslie Odom Jr. made a cameo. 

What do you think that says? 

Not saying people didn’t love the video game references, because a lot of people did, but it wasn’t the main thing people responded to. 

It’s okay to explore different mediums for storytelling. But sometimes, as a creator, you have to stop and ask yourself, “Is this really necessary for the story?” And believe me the hardest thing to do is cut out something that I spent hours working on because, when I viewed the story as a whole, that particular thing just wasn’t necessary for the story. Maybe I enjoyed it, and perhaps others would too, but at the end of the day, I’d be glad that I made the decision for the betterment of the story.

Okay, now this got way longer than I meant for it to be (how ironic) but you’ve all been waiting for this post for awhile and I didn’t want to postpone it further. 

I do hope you enjoyed reading this jumbled mess and, as always, feel free to let me know what your opinions were! Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, and I’ll see y’all next time! 

[prorevenge]

Owner screws me over, screws up(s) his business.

To start, I won’t be saying the name of the shipping company franchise I worked for, suffice to say the title is very telling. This is a rather long story, so buckle in. You can skip the backstory and look for the revenge near the bottom. TL:DR at the end.

The Backstory

About five or six years ago I was relatively new to the workforce, having worked one minimum wage job at Mickey D’s. I had been there almost two years, but had little experience elsewhere. Well this one lady always came through early every morning to order a large Diet Coke, and would take a few minutes to talk to me. I mentioned to her that I was displeased with my bosses and the working conditions, and she invited me to come apply for a job at Not FedEx because they were always running low on employees! That should have been my first red flag.

The second red flag went completely over my head, because at this point I was 17 with no previous job experience. When I walked in for an interview, the boss (who I will call Jeph, because it sounds close enough to his name to allow him to remain anonymous) told me it would take five minutes. I wasn’t asked about my relevant experience, my goals within the company, or even told what position I was applying for. I assumed all interviews were different and went along with it, and started the next week with training. Everything went well for the first month. I basically just packed boxes, took down customer information, and sorted mail into the mailboxes we managed. The real trouble started after I was given my one month performance review.

I was deemed to be a valuable asset to Jeph’s franchise, and rightfully so. At 17 I was able to lift more and work better than the 20 and 30 something employees, and due to the work ethic my parents drilled into me I was never slacking off while at work. I was then informed that I would be swapping between Jeph’s two franchises, roughly 30 miles apart. (For context, the franchise I APPLIED TO WORK AT was roughly a mile from my house, so I could walk if I couldn’t get a ride.) Every other day I had to drive out to the location and somehow justify this with my slightly above minimum wage job. ($7.50 for those not in Texas.)

Overall my boss was a massive douche. His physical appearance could best be described as “troll like” with a shirt almost bursting, the top always undone to showcase his aging chest hair, and a face not unlike that of A&F owner Mike Jeffries. He openly cheated on his wife, bragging to coworkers about it constantly. He charged people one dollar for any amount of extra tape they needed on their package, despite the fact that we got roughly two rolls for that price in bulk. He had a special price calculator installed on the computers that charged people roughly 10% more than the package would be elsewhere. He would push employees (who he insisted didn’t work in customer service but sales) to never offer anything less than three day shipping even though we offered standard 7+ days and even cheaper options. I watched him actively lie to customers, claiming it was the price they had to pay blah blah blah, and almost yell at them to go to another store if they didn’t like it. But I digress.

Now here was the first dickish thing that my boss did to me specifically. Until this point, I was only working around 20 hours. After I graduated to working at both stores, Jeph had me sign a brand new W-2 for his second store, which was under a different company. (He owned both, naming one Blue (name for a .44 caliber bullet) and Blue (proper name for visible light)). Again, I had very little idea that this wrong because I had never had to deal with this before. He proceed to add another 20 or so hours to my schedule, bringing me up to 40 hours or more. But since I worked for two separate companies I never earned a dime of overtime or benefits of any kind.

At this point, I started accruing more and more duties, as my boss and coworkers started to trust me more and more. Buy my fourth month of employment (out of a total of eight) I was performing managerial duties such as: opening the store, counting the registers, closing the store, ordering product such as boxes and tape, and preparing shipments for transport. The work alone justified a raise, not to mention the hours I was being asked to work. However when I floated this idea by my boss, he very rudely insisted that since he had a manager for each store already, I was just doing my job and couldn’t earn a cent more.

Then came the second dickish move. We had a large company contract some drop off stuff with us, a telecom company we will say rhymes with Hey Tea and Tea. Customers would bring in their old cable boxes, wires, remotes and the like, and we would scan them and ship them back to Hey Tea and Tea, the company THAT LEGALLY OWNED ALL OF THIS HARDWARE. The customers would not pay us a nickel, but the telecom company would pay almost double what it actually cost to ship the package. There is no way Jeph could look that gift horse in the mouth and decide he was still owed the stable and all the horse’s tack as well, right? Surprise, surprise, Jeph had to take it one step further. ANY and ALL parts/cables/WiFi adapters/USB drives the customer returned to us that didn’t have a scan tag on them, Jeph would pull aside and either strip for copper or sell on eBay. And he would force us, the employees to package his eBay sales or copper wiring into boxes and ship them for him. He even popped batteries out of remotes and recycled them somewhere to get a tax credit. None of his employees ever saw a penny of this money (not that I would have accepted it). We estimated he raked in roughly three to four thousand a month just from stealing alone. For those of you bad at math, that is the price of TWO brand new 2018 Honda Civics.

The Revenge

The third (and fourth) final dick moves are what solidified my hatred for this boss, and my desire to strike back. They both came in the same week, roughly the same time, and both viscerally repulsive. My favorite coworker had recently gotten pregnant, and although the father got the hell out of dodge when he found out, she was doing very well for herself. She and I frequently closed together, and she promised she would bring the baby to sit in the back for the dull hours we had to kill from 6-10. We also had an annual store review from corporate that week, so our boss called a late night meeting after we closed one day. Our boss started out by saying that he was proud of our pregnant coworker for working so hard even with her “disability.” (Yes, even his sense of humor was slimy.) Then, in front of all fifteen employees, HE FIRED HER. He told her that because the Christmas season was coming up, and she would only slow down the store being pregnant and all, he had to let her go.

After she left, hatred seething in her eyes, he turned back to the fourteen of us who were left stunned, and continued on like nothing had happened. He proceeded to tell each of us our jobs for this weekend, leaving mine for last. My job, because I used to drive a decently sized mini van, was to ferry the corporate required supplies, cash for the safe, and OUR ONE WORKING FIRE EXTINGUISHER between the two stores while he kept corporate distracted between visits.

At this point I had taken enough shit from this guy, and I formulated my plan. I started by calling the Hey Tea and Tea fraud department, and telling them everything I knew. I took pictures and emailed them directly to the rep I was talking to, who seemed a little too excited about fraud being committed. I then scheduled a visit from a Hey Tea and Tea rep at the same time corporate was supposed to show up. My next step was to call Not FedEx and explain exactly what I just told y’all, with a few extra things thrown in that I couldn’t share for privacy reasons. They promised to send a rep as well, to the same store, at the same time.

The final step was put into action that Saturday. I dutifully loaded up my van with the supplies, cash (upwards of $4000 if I remember correctly), and fire extinguisher, and headed out. Except I did the exact OPPOSITE of what Jeph wanted. I took the crap to the first store he owned, which was the second one to receive a visit. After he texted the team saying they were moving on, I packed up all the shit and drove it to the other store they just left. Now I am unsure exactly what happened at the other store, but from some coworkers I pieced together that the Not FedEx rep showed up right after I left, but didn’t stay long, and the Hey Tea and Tea rep showed up just before Jeph had arrived and had time to hide his ill gotten gains in his office. The one coworker who was close enough to the office during the corporate meeting said there was lots of angry words being thrown and threats being made towards Jeph and his position as a franchisee. He also lost his franchises the ability to ship for Hey Tea and Tea, at least for a period of time.

Regardless, the very next day I was off because I was (and as cliché as this sounds I swear to God it’s true) helping my grandfather who just got out of the hospital. I receive a call from Jeph, saying I needed to come in right away, and work a double shift as well as close the store. I told him I couldn’t do that, and I was taking a personal day. He fired me right then and there, citing my usage of the work computer to run a photoshop business during work hours. (I’m assuming he was referring to the graphic design work I did FOR HIM, FOR FREE, which he asked me to learn how to do.)

The sad epilogue to this whole story is that he is currently still in business, and still running the same scams he was before. He WAS however fined for not having proper supplies in his stores, as well as forced to use corporate’s package rates rather than his own. So in some small way my revenge worked. He currently has a two star review on Yelp for both of his his businesses, and I hope to have a party outside his store one day when it goes belly up.

TL:DR: Boss is a total douche bag to me and customers, steals from a contract company, fires a pregnant woman for “slowing down the store” then gets his ass reamed by corporate and loses the major contract.

(source) (story by Chewbacca_Q_Wookie)

[5hfanfiction]

Back in the Christmas Spirit

Mariah Carey’s song, “All I Want for Christmas is You” never failed to get me into that festive Christmas spirit, even if it was the middle of July (and I was a hardcore wait-until-December person). That is, until I endured the worst breakup of the century right before the holidays.

Brian and I met in college at our dorm’s welcoming event, and were immediately drawn to each other. We had only been dating for six and a half months, but I honestly thought we would be together forever. He wasn’t perfect, but the fact that we could work through our differences made me believe we could make it work long term. Call me cliché, but I was completely in love with the boy, and I was convinced there would be no one else like him.

“Mija, come look at this tree,” my mom gestured toward a Douglas fir.

“Coming, mami.” I sighed. Of course the Mariah Carey song was playing on a speaker at the little Christmas tree farm. I was so not in the Christmas spirit these days.

“I really like the size of the trunk, and it would fit just perfectly right in the corner of the living room, don’t you think?” my mom asked. I nodded robotically. As she continued to drone on about the tree, I pictured Brian and me shopping for our first Christmas tree. It would have to be small, because we were both practical people, and wouldn’t have too big of a starter home. We would take it home and decorate it with our dog or cat (he loves cats, I love dogs). Then we would cozy up on the couch and watch Netflix or maybe play some video games. I smiled, and then groaned.

“Are you okay, Camila?” my mom inquired, furrowing her eyebrows.

“Yeah I just….drank too much hot chocolate,” I lied.

The ride home consisted of my mom thinking out loud about where the Christmas decorations would go, and me scrolling through my camera roll for the fifth time that day. There were so many pictures of me smiling, and Brian doing that crooked half smile he did for the camera.  There were a few candid ones of him naturally smiling, and I swear his smile could light up a room. My eyes started to well up. I kept scrolling anyway, and landed on one from Halloween. I was dressed up as Batgirl, my costume consisting of an old, almost too small Batman shirt, and a mask from Goodwill. Brian was Nightwing. He was the kind of guy who actually put effort into his costumes, and referred to them as “cosplays”. He looked so good in his black leather jacket with the painted on Nightwing insignia and his black skinny jeans that I loved so much. There was someone else in the picture, Gina. Gina was dressed as Wonder Woman. She had found the cape, the boots, and the corset herself, and I had helped her find a cool skirt at a nearby thrift store. Her hair wasn’t brunette, but her large, thick mess of strawberry-blonde locks were epic enough to be for Wonder Woman. Gina was with us so often, we called her our third wheel. She also happened to be the girl Brian left me for.

***

I helped my mom bring the tree inside, and after much deliberation, she decided to put it to the left of the television. When my dad and sister got home, we put on some Michael Buble, and decorated the tree. My family sang along joyously to the music, while I grumbled and hung up the ornaments. The song “Blue Christmas” came on and I thought now that’s more like it.

Afterwards, I crawled into my bed and relived the moment in my head, as I did quite often. It was the morning after his roommate, John’s birthday party. The party wasn’t especially fun for me, because there were a lot of younger, louder kids there, but the food was good, and Brian seemed to be enjoying himself. We played one of those really strategic board games that I wasn’t very good at, but it was right up Brian’s ally. He could tell I wasn’t having that much fun, so he occasionally squeezed my hand and gave me a sympathetic smile. I responded by affectionately running my hand through his soft, almost wavy, brown hair, and burying my face in his neck. I usually hated being one of those couples that couldn’t keep their hands off each other in public, but for some reason that night I didn’t care.

The next morning out of the blue, he texted me “I need to tell you something. Meet me in the lounge?”

We sat there for a couple minutes in silence, while he looked at the table and tried to gather the words. Finally, in a small voice, he said “There’s no good way to say this, but…I have feelings for Gina.”

My breath caught in my throat.

I often use humor as a defense mechanism, so I said “Yeah you’re right, there’s no good way to put that,” with a fake chuckle.

Still looking at the table, he uttered one of those laughs that aren’t quite laughs, more like quick exhales.

“What kind of feelings are we talking about?” I asked, hoping that this was just a little crush that he would get over quickly.

“It….feels like I want to be with her. Actually it kind of feels like I’m already with her, just not officially.”

My heart sank, and my eyes started to sting. This was no silly crush.

They started dating two weeks later.

I groaned and buried my face into my pillow. Just thinking about them together made my chest constrict and the tears flow. I sobbed until I ran out of tears and drifted off to sleep.

***

It was December 23rd, and because I was wallowing in misery, I had neglected to buy any Christmas presents for my family. I drove to a local boutique that I knew would have a lot of knick-knacks for me to choose from. After browsing the shop for about ten minutes, I decided on a mug for my dad that had a Washington State logo on it, a bottle of goat’s milk lotion for my mom, and a teddy bear for Sofi. As I was standing in the long line, “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber came on. The familiar pang of sadness hit me in the chest. I wouldn’t be kissing Brian under the mistletoe like I had planned this year.

“You okay?” a voice asked.

I turned my eyes to the voice. It belonged to a girl about my age that had the prettiest , and most captivating pair of green eyes I had ever seen, and long, wavy, dark brown hair under a black beanie. She looked nice, but her stare was so intense I dropped my gaze a split second after I looked up.

“Um…I’m alright,” I stammered, still not making eye contact. “Why do you ask?”

The girl chuckled. “Well, you kind of winced just now.”

My cheeks got hot. Was I really that obvious? “Oh, yeah I don’t really like this song,” I said, shrugging.

“Why not?” the girl asked.

“I….” I trailed off. I don’t usually like telling strangers my business, unlike my mom, who could tell her entire life story to a random person on the street. But there was something about this girl that made me want to tell her everything.

“I’m just going through a tough breakup,” I admitted.

“Ah,” the girl nodded. “That makes sense.”

When I finally looked up at her eyes, they were sympathetic, and yet still curious. I was so busy staring I didn’t notice it was my turn in line.

“Oh right, I’m coming,” I said hurriedly, and quickly put my stuff on the counter in front of a frazzled looking employee.

The girl laughed quietly, and my face flushed again.

After we had both purchased our gifts, we walked outside together. The downtown street was filled with last minute shoppers, and there were tiny trees on the sidewalk that were covered in twinkling lights. I had always dreamed of walking down one of these streets in the winter with Brian.

“There you go with that sad look again,” the girl pointed out.

I sighed. “I guess I’m one of those people who wear their heart on their sleeve,” I said.

“I’m Lauren by the way,” she stopped, and held out her free hand.

“Camila,” I replied, shaking it.

She smiled, and I swear that smile could bring a puppy back to life. I found myself gawking again. Only two smiles had ever affected me this much.

Lauren gestured down the street. “Where are you parked?” she asked.

I blinked. Snap out of it, Camila I told myself. “Uhh, a ways down,” I responded. It was hard to find parking anywhere close.

“Cool, me too,” Lauren said with another smile.

“So tell me about this breakup that’s making you dislike amazing music,” she said as we walked down the street.

“Basically he left me for one of my friends,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Lauren winced. “Ooo that sucks,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, “I replied. “To make matters worse, we live in the same residence hall at school.”

“Yikes,” she said. “Where do you go to school?”

“Seattle Pacific,” I replied. “What about you?”

“I actually go to Oregon State, and I’m from Oregon, but my family just moved here,” said Lauren.

“Oh wow, why did you guys move to this tiny town of all places?” I wondered aloud.

“Well, my mom actually grew up here, and she really missed it”, she responded.

We had reached my car, but I didn’t want to stop talking to Lauren. There was something about her that made me want to get to know her. It could be because she was so easy to talk to, but her good looks didn’t hurt either.

“Um, since you’re new here, how about I give you a little tour of downtown?” I asked.

Lauren smiled one those earth-bending smiles. “I would love that,” she replied.

I think my heart fluttered a little bit.

***

We ended up not caring too much about the town, and got to know each other a little bit. We found out we both had Cuban descent, we both loved to sing, and we had practically the same taste in music and books. 

“You saw The 1975?” Lauren exclaimed. “I am so jealous!”

“Yeah they were sooo good,” I told her. “Definitely one of the best nights of my life. However, my dream is still to see Coldplay live,” I said wistfully.

Lauren stopped and looked at me with wide eyes. “Oh my gosh, me too!”

I smiled. “Wow we are so alike,” I said.

“We really are,” she said, staring at me with a grin. “You know….that guy really made a mistake.”

For probably the fifth time that night, I blushed and looked at the ground. Lauren didn’t know I liked girls. Actually, only a few people knew. Even so, I didn’t know how to like someone other than Brian. The thought just seemed wrong. But Lauren was looking at me with those eyes, and it looked like she was getting closer. I looked up, and her face was suddenly inches away from mine. Her eyes were darting from my lips to my eyes, almost silently questioning me. My heart was racing, but I slowly closed the gap between us, and our lips connected. Everything seemed to go in slow motion. Her lips moved against mine ever so slightly, and for the first time since Brian and I broke up, I felt alive. I slowly pulled away, and opened by eyes. Lauren was smiling. I smiled back shyly and looked at the ground.

The kiss was amazing, but…

But what? My mind asked. An amazingly attractive, intelligent person just kissed you and you’re questioning it?

I can’t jump into a new relationship when I’m still hurting from the last one I thought back to myself.

Oh my gosh, she’s waiting for you to say something and you’re standing here awkwardly having a conversation with yourself in your head!

“Look, Lauren…I really like you, but-“

“You need more time,” she finished.

I sighed. “Yes,” I said.

She smiled understandingly and asked “Can I still have your number?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said, and pulled out my phone. She put her number in my phone, and I put mine in hers.

“When you get over that guy, give me a call,” Lauren said as she gave me my phone back.

“I definitely will,” I promised.

She flashed me a grin, and then turned and walked to her car. I stared for a few minutes as she went, before getting into my Honda. Lauren and I had only spent about an hour together, but I got the feeling she would be an important part of my life. As I drove home, “All I Want for Christmas” came on the radio, and I smiled.

[agressivelyunfancynerd]

Happy Birthday to You (Bucky Fic)

Pairings: Bucky x Female Reader

Warnings: Fluff. Almost smut.

Blurb: When Stark embarrasses you by springing a surprise birthday party on you, you have a few too many drinks and confront Bucky about his hate for you; only it’s not what you think.

Word Count: 2,600+

You’d been at the Avengers tower for about six months now, and in that time you had become pretty good friends with all of them.

You loved talking to Steve about the past and history, what really happened as opposed to what was written in the books.

You and Tony loved to try your hand at building things, although you were usually more there watching than actually helping. He did let you try on his helmet once, which was awesome.

You always went to Bruce when you had a science-y question, or just wanted to chat, he was probably your favourite person. In fact, you did sort of have a crush on him, if only he was a little younger or you were a little older – or you know, if he didn’t have eyes for Nat, who could kill you with her pinkie finger.

You and Nat became really good sparring partners; you loved how she pushed you to be better, without screaming at you and making you hate physical exercise.

Clint was teaching you how to shoot arrows and throw knives. And skulk around the tower and scare people, like he does.  

Sam and Peter were basically like the two annoying brothers you never had. Constantly pushing your buttons. You loved the goofballs though.

Wanda was your roommate for a time, when you first arrived, she said she knew what it was like to be the newbie and to feel alone, and she wasn’t going to let that happen to you; and since then you’d become good friends. You often stayed up into the wee hours of the morning in either her room or yours, wrapped up in blankets, talking or watching TV.  

Thor was so much fun; you loved spending time with him. Especially when he talked about the realms and the stars and Asgard. One time you got him to talk to you about his favourite place in the entire universe and you drew it in your sketch pad, when you were done he was so happy about how perfect you captured it, he bear hugged you until you almost passed out. He reminded you of a giant Labrador, so full of love and happiness. Despite being the God of Thunder.

You hadn’t really had much to do with Vision or Rhodey though, but they seemed like nice guys.

And then there was Bucky. He wouldn’t give you the time of day. Never said hello, or smiled – did he even know how to smile – when you had to spar with him, he didn’t hold back. Often you left the sessions hurting, bruised. If you came into a room and no one else was there, he got up and left, if someone else was there he pulled them into a deep conversation until you left. If you said you were going to one of Stark’s parties, he either didn’t show up, or showed up for ten minutes and then left with some hot piece of ass.

You only wished you knew what you did or said to make him hate you. You weren’t a bad person, you were friendly, you talked about anything, you made a mean coffee cheesecake, and you were up for any kind of adventure – sitting watching Netflix, hiking, going to the beach. You just couldn’t fathom why someone hated you so much, with every fiber of their being, like Bucky did.

***

You were having the most wonderful dream, when your phone blared its annoying text tone, to alert you that you had a message. You rolled over in your bed, blinking and trying to wake up. You grabbed your phone, and with one eye open, you clicked it on and read a message from Tony.

 === YOU’RE INVITED ===

Party with the Avengers!!!

@ The Avengers Tower

SIX O’CLOCK TONIGHT!

No RSVP Necessary

- Tony Stark

 You grumbled. Normally you didn’t mind Stark’s parties, but after your latest encounter with Bucky you were in no mood to party. Yesterday you’d been sparring with Nat when she was called away, and Bucky was asked to step in, he basically knocked you off balance, yelled at you for being so easily knocked off balance and then stormed out of the training room.

Your cheeks grew hot with embarrassment and you ended up going back to your room and crying in the bottom of your shower like a little child. Bucky just pushed your buttons.

Did you really have to go to the party? Would Stark even notice? You kept trying to think up ways to get out of it, but nothing came to you.

You got out of bed and went for a shower, it was already one o’clock, you’d slept in; which was great, but also bad, because now you had even less time to mentally and emotionally prepare for the party.

After your shower you decided to head to Wanda’s room and grab her, stopping on the way to grab Nat, if you were going to the party you were going to look and feel hot, but you were going to need all the help you could get.

You knocked on Nat’s door.

“Hey Y/N, what’s up?” Nat said.

“I need your help, can you go to my room and wait for me, and I’ll be back in a second.” You said, turning away. Nat agreed and was already heading to your room.

You got to Wanda’s door and before you could knock she was already opening it.

“I knew you’d come, as soon as I got Stark’s text, what’s up?” She asked, smiling.

“I need you and Nat to make me pretty for the party, and help me pick a rocking outfit.” You said.

“You’re already pretty Y/N” Wanda sighed, “but we’ll see how we can highlight that” she winked.

You and Wanda were just turning into your bedroom when you noticed Nat had already laid some clothes on the bed, some yours, and some hers. You would swear, she was a mind reader. Wanda went to your wardrobe and grabbed a few other bits and pieces and put them down too, before running back to hers and Nat’s room and grabbing the makeup bags.  

After hours of primping and polishing you were done. Nat and Wanda had butted heads on a few things, and you flatly refused a few as well, but between the three of you, you came out with a rocking, biker chic outfit, killer boots and makeup that would have models jealous.

“Oh my god, I love it! Thank you so much you guys!” You smiled at them in the mirror.

“Hey, the foundation was already there, we just added to it” Nat said, smiling and then leaving the room.

“Every guy in that party tonight is going to want your number girl! And maybe half the ladies too, you look hot!” Wanda winked, giving your shoulder a quick squeeze before she too left to get ready.

You were actually in awe of your outfit. It was the perfect combo of street style and girly chic. You had a slinky black dress with long see through lace sleeves, and a daring V-neck cut, courtesy of Wanda, which you paired with thigh high black leather boots, courtesy of Nat; a leather jacket with lace in the back and sleeves, which you were proud to say was your own pick. Then you just polished the outfit with a nice choker necklace, and some rings.

Your makeup was fierce, cat eyed eyeliner, dark smoky eyes, and bright cherry red lips, again courtesy of Wanda. That girl loved her red. You did one last check in the mirror before heading out of your room.

***

Guests had started arriving at four, it was crazy. By six when the party actually started it was booming, loud music, hot bodies dancing, and alcohol in every hand. You shouldered your way through until you were at the bar.

“Hey Steve” you half yelled when you saw him sitting alone.

“Hey Y/N– wow! You look, you, ah. You look really beautiful” he smiled. You and Steve chatted for a while, until Sam and Thor came over, something about a darts challenge, you weren’t really sure.

Just as you signalled the bartender for another drink you noticed Bucky enter. Along with every other woman in the place. He wore a tight black button down, black skinny-ish jeans and his signature combat boots. He’d brushed his hair and put it in a little bun.

Your breath caught for like two seconds before you realised he was staring at you. You quickly turned and downed your drink.

When you thought it was safe to glance back over your shoulder, you did, only to see Bucky still staring. Just as you were about to make a run for the door, Stark came in and told everyone to shut the hell up. The room went dead.

“Now, unlike most of my other parties … Okay, unlike all of my other parties, this one actually has a reason behind it!” he yelled, everyone looked puzzled and started whispering back and forth. You took another chance to scan the room, eyes automatically falling on Bucky, who was still staring.

“This party is sort of a welcome, for our newest Avengers,” he glanced at you, then at Peter, and T’Challa who’d only recently agreed to be a fully fledged Avenger, “it’s also someone’s birthday, and I do love birthdays” he continued.

Before your brain could respond, Stark was pointing at you, and a spotlight came on, lighting you up like a Christmas tree.

“Let’s all give up for Y/N on her birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” Tony yelled, before the crowd started singing happy birthday. Your cheeks were burning. You looked up at Stark, and glared. He only winked at you.

You looked back into the crowd of people, Bucky was, smirking.

***

You’re not sure how many drinks you had after Tony’s announcement, but it was definitely more than your average two. You were past tipsy, and heading straight into crash and burn territory. But not before you did something incredibly stupid that you would definitely regret tomorrow.

You hoped up off of your stool at the bar, pushed past everyone and sauntered straight over to Bucky and slapped him right across the face. The resounding slap making the whole room silent.

Thor who was mere feet away was standing with his mouth hanging open; Steve had stood up from his chair, but was unsure of how to react, you didn’t know, or care where the rest of the team was, and Bucky, Bucky actually smiled.

“You’re a real piece of work ya know that! I can see it in the way you stare at me, you don’t think I am worth your time; you won’t even take the time to get to know the person I might be, no matter how nice I am to you, or how friendly I try to be, you could care less. And it’s bullshit! You treat me like shit on your shoes, you push me harder in sparring than anyone else, and you just about break my back every time we train! What, the actual fuck did I do to you? Huh?!” you threw your arms up in the air, giving a quick circle before turning back to him, “Did I take your favourite coffee cup without asking? Did I take your spot on the couch? Did I offend you in any way? Please for the love of fuck tell me! Because I would really fucking love to know!” When you had finished yelling and realised that everyone was staring at you, whispering, the heat started to come back to your cheeks, and Bucky was still smiling.

“You know what; I’m done trying to be nice. FUCK YOU!” you spat at him, and for a split second, his smile wavered, before he steeled himself. You stormed out of the party, stomping your feet every step of the way to the elevators.

The elevator dinged and you stepped inside. Just as the doors began to shut Bucky shouldered in. He waited for the doors to close, and then hit the emergency stop button, before turning and walking right up to you, backing you into the wall, and put his hands on the wall, either side of your body. You tensed.

His crystal blue eyes bore into you.

“I don’t hate you” he whispered, so soft you barely heard it.

“What?”

“I. Don’t. Fucking. Hate. You” he said, making sure to enunciate every word.

“Oh yeah? Then why do you treat me so shit, huh?!” You tried to get past him, but he wouldn’t budge.

“Because I like you, you intrigue me, you, you’re something else.”

“WHAT?! You treat me like shit because I interest you? Because you like me? What are we, in second grade?!” You were screaming again.

“I treat you like I do, because you’re the strongest person I know, and I know you can take it, anyone else would’ve given up a long time ago, trying to be my friend, but you didn’t, anyone else would’ve punched me in the face for pushing them so hard in training, but not you, you took it and came back for more, it’s exciting.”

You rolled your eyes and groaned. He was being childish. I like you, so I treat you like shit.

“Ya know, a better, more adult way, of treating someone you like is to, A, tell them you like them, B, act like a human being with them, you know smile at them when they smile, say hello when they say hello, not just grunt, and C, maybe once in a while tell them something looks nice; like oh hey Steve love the new hair cut! You know, be a person.” You grumble.

“Okay,” he whispered, taking a step closer to you, the heat radiating off his body, his breath warm on your skin. “Y/N, I like you,” he smiled, “I will endeavour to say hello to you, every time you say it to me, from now on, and also, you look fucking gorgeous in that dress tonight doll face. You give a man all kinds of ideas.” He winked.

Between your thighs got hot and you could feel the pooling in your panties.

You went to push him away, he was clearly drunk and didn’t know what he was saying, but before you could move, he’d pinned your arms above your head, and his lips crashed into yours. It was a deep, hungry kiss. His body was pressed so hard against yours; you could feel him getting hard.

His lips left yours and he started trailing down your neck, until his head was right at the base of the V-neck, just above your breasts. You moaned and he looked up at you from under his lashes and smirked.

“Good to know the feeling is mutual then” he teased. Before making his way back up to your lips. You kissed him again, harder and more hungry than before. Your legs shot up and wrapped around his waist and you rolled your hips against him to get some friction.

“You know I didn’t get to ask, what with you yelling at me,” he said in between kisses, “what do you want for your birthday?”

“You” was all you could croak out.

“And so you shall, as many times as you want, birthday girl.” He grinned.

With that, Bucky let your legs fall back to the floor, which made you whimper; he slammed the button to your floor and when the elevator arrived he pulled you by the arm until you were in your room.

 End.

   Inspired by the song “Like That” by Bea Miller, specifically these lyrics:

Can see it from the way you looking at me You don't think I'm worth your time Don't care about the person that I might be Offended that I walk the line So what if I'm not So what if I'm not everything you wanted me to be? So what if I am So what if I am more than you can see? When you treat me like that, when you treat me like that It's pushin' me harder, it's pushin' me harder When you breakin' my back, when you breakin' my back

[neverisalongtime-ja-blog]

Chapter 10: Celebrity status

Hello fanfic lovers and Klinghoffer lovers and Joshan lover!

I hope you all are having a lovely week! To top that here is chapter 10 of this story. I reeeeally hope you like it and don’t forget the feedback!

There is a reference in this chapter of a interview Josh had at Lollapalooza, so if you find it, tell me!

Remember to follow Anastasia on Instagram because is cute!

Anastasia_Truman

Much love to you all! ❤️️

---------------------------------

Read chapter 9

-          You are going to drive from New York to Chicago? – Mandy asked her friend, Anastasia, through the phone – You realize that it’s an almost thirteen hour trip? Right?

-          I know. Josh and I will take turns at the wheel – Anastasia answered.

-          That is a totally unnecessary thing to do – Mandy replied.

-          It’s going to be fun. A fun road trip.

-          A day before a concert! A huge concert! You are going to be tired!

-          I won’t. I promise!

-          Anyway, I heard that Jacob is going to Lolla too! He is traveling from London with Mark and Steph!

-          I haven’t seen Stephanie in years – Stephanie was Mark’s (Anastasia’s brother) long time girlfriend.

-          Yes! It’s going to be like a family thing. I can imagine that Barbara is going to be there as well.

-          She hasn’t spent a single night here in the room. I haven’t even seen her actually.

-          Well, divorces can be really hard, you know. Unless Anthony Kiedis is your best friend, that way you forget about your ex real quick.

-          You are insane! I gotta go. I’ll call you when I arrive to Chicago; I think you’ll be there already by that time.

-          Have a safe trip! – Mandy said before hung the phone.

Josh had the idea of driving to Chicago and Anastasia though it was crazy at first but then though it was going to be a good thing to create some kind of bond with him.

-          Did you bring music? – Josh asked before starting the engine of the rented black Hyundai SUV.

-          I grabbed everything that was in my laptop. That includes a bunch of 90’s pop, a lot of British indie rock, many of the crap I had produced for other people and every single song by Fleetwood Mac because Stevie Nicks is the entity for which I wake up every morning.

-          Really? – He asked.

-          I’ll do anything for Stevie.

-          Well I’ll take Fleetwood and the British stuff.

They alternate between Anastasia’s and Josh’s flash disks, which had a lot of better tunes, so they drove with the most eclectic music choices anyone can possibly imagine.

-          I have a doubt – Josh asked while they were listening to a British band called Franz Ferdinand, which was Anastasia’s choice – You are British, right?

-          Yes, I was born in Chelsea, I think I told you.

-          So where is your British accent?

-          Well it disappeared. I’ve been living in LA for almost fifteen years, Josh. I am the most non-British British you can find.

-          That sucks because I am a sucker for British everything.

-          Well in that case I can be very British sometimes – They both laugh – I still visit London once a year, mostly at Christmas time. I do it for my father.

-          Just for your father?

-          The rest of the family members aren’t fans of me. It’s complicated. Everybody hates the outside-marriage children – Anastasia has another two sisters for her father’s side. Their mom was married to Nick when he cheated her with Anastasia’s mother.

-          I’ve read a little bit about that.

-          Did you Google me? – Anastasia said stoic.

-          Well not like that. But there is a lot of information about you out there.

-          Yes, mostly fake.

After singing every possible line to Fleetwood Mac’s songs and a few quick stops for gas and food the couple arrived to Chicago. The trip really helped both of them. They connected in a new level; they felt more comfortable in each other’s company. They finally drove to an exclusive hotel in the city where everyone was going to stay, Mandy and the boys were already there but Anastasia was too tired to do anything so she and Josh agreed on not telling anyone they had arrived and sneak to Josh’s room to get some sleep.

This time in bed was so different. They just slept, but sleeping together brought a whole different kind of intimacy than that of sex. The way Josh hugged her and buried his face on her neck gave Anastasia a solid base to assure her decision about this relationship, even if it wasn’t an official thing yet.

When Anastasia woke up it was already dark outside. She let Josh sleep and quietly left the room. She looked at her phone and saw around 12 messages and six missing calls from Mandy, the last text indicated that she was at the hotel bar with Barbara and Mark.

Once Anastasia walked through the bar door she saw her family and friends at a table to her left. Mandy was there, obviously next to Barbara and Mark who was hugging her girlfriend, Stephanie, with an arm and next to Mandy there was another man, when she got close she could see his face, it was Jacob her childhood friend from London, a short and really pale guy with piercing blue eyes and black short hair. The two had history together. Besides being the best of friends to this day, Jacob was Anastasia’s first everything, they tried to have a long distance relationship (Her in California, him in London) when they were around seventeen, but they were very young and dumb and with time they realized they loved each other more as friends than anything else. Even after that, their friendship/relationship was highly publicized in the British tabloids, he was a child actor at that time, and she was the trouble daughter of a very famous rocker. “A match made in hell” as one of the tabloids recalled.

Jacob was the first to get up and greet her.

-          You haven’t changed a thing – He said giving her a tight hug.

-          I won’t. I will never change – she answered.

-          Wait until you are fifty, you’ll need Botox if you want to keep that baby face of yours – Barbara opined.

-          Are you here for the festival? – Anastasia wanted to know.

-          Yes! And I’m gonna start to film a movie in New York in a couple of weeks so I decided to come early and that way I could see you! I missed you!

-          I missed you too! But we Skype like once a month, Jacob.

-          It’s not the same – Mandy said suddenly – Where is Josh by the way?

-          Sleeping.

-          How do you know that Josh is sleeping right now? – Mark asked surprised.

-          Oh… Don’t you know? – Mandy said – It happened – Mark didn’t have to say a thing. He understood what Mandy was saying. He started to laugh.

-          Steph! It’s so amazing to see you again – Anastasia said changing the subject of the conversation.

Stephanie, tall with light brown hair and pale skin was Mark’s long-time girlfriend. They had been together for around 10 years; she was undoubtedly a part of the family. More than that, she was a great and close friend for Anastasia. Unlike with Jacob, they Skype at least twice a month.

-          So you have a boy? – Steph asked with a heavy accent while Anastasia took a seat between her and Jacob.

-          More like a grow ass man – Mandy said from the other side of the table.

-          We are just getting to know each other – Anastasia said to Steph.

-          You’ve known him for more than five years – Mandy said.

-          Yes but not this way – Anastasia said to Mandy – He is one of Mark’s friends – she said looking to Stephanie again.

-          Oh! Do I know him?

-          I don’t know – Mark said – I think we saw him once in London. You will remember him when you see him, the guy is quite unforgettable.

-          And that is the Josh effect: nobody can forget him – Mandy said laughing.

-          You didn’t tell me about this – Jacob said suddenly.

-          It’s pretty recent – Anastasia answered – I still don’t know if I want a real and long term relationship with him. So when I’m ready to tell you I will.

The night went by catching up with Stephanie and Jacob. Anastasia was happy to see him. Jacob had always been a great support to her. When all the disaster with Valentine happened he flew all the way from London to Los Angeles just to be with her. They didn’t feel a romantic nor sexual connection between them, but a strong friendship was definitely there. Since the tabloid mess when they were teenagers happened, all their encounters somehow ended on the news and social media, a thing Anastasia hated and which had been a good reason for not seeing him so often.

Anastasia though that Josh must have slept the entire night through the next day because she didn’t have any information about him, even at the festival.

The band got early to the show location for all the interviews they had to do. Mandy and Anastasia always did most of the press schedule, but this time they all had to do the same job. Around three in the afternoon Anastasia met with Barbara to go to the Chili Peppers trailer. They opened the door not knowing that Josh was inside in the middle of an interview, they excused themselves and ran to the next door. She could see Josh smiling at her because of the situation.

Only Flea and Anthony were in the trailer.

-          A journalist just said that Mandy and I are the female version of you two and I can’t feel more satisfied with myself right now – Anastasia said to Anthony and Flea.

-          It’s not far from the truth – Flea said – I mean we all kind of raised you so it’s logical that you have some of us in your attitude and in the way you found Mandy, who complements you so well.

-          Man, don’t I love you enough – Anastasia said – By the way, I think we just ruined Josh’s interview.

-          Is it true that you two came driving from New York? – Anthony wanted to know.

-          Yes. It was more fun than what I thought it would be.

-          Is something going on there? – Anthony asked again and Anastasia just shrugged.

-          Do you think something should happen? -Anastasia asked.

-          Yes, damn it! -Anthony said and everyone laughed.

After a while they went outside again and spotted Josh talking to her brother, Nick, Eric and Jacob.

-          So you two already met? – She asked approaching them and pointing to Josh and Jacob.

-          Yes! Being the big Red Hot Chili Pepper fan that I am, I’m stoic – Jacob said.

-          I still can’t believe you are here – Anastasia said hugging Jacob.

-          I haven’t seen you on a stage in years, it was about damn time! – He smiled to her.

-          We have to be ready in 30 minutes – Eric said.

-          WHAT? – Anastasia screamed – I’m far from ready! I need to change.

-          You better run – Nick said.

She did. She found Mandy and Steph on her trailer who helped her get ready. She did her hair and makeup and they helped her put on her outfit, a special one: black high-waisted fringed shorts, a black t-shirt with the word “Witch” in silver letters and velvet over-the-knee boots in blue. She and Mandy wore their quartz crowns, which were “their thing” and were ready to go.

Stephanie was dancing next to Barbara at a side of the stage while Jacob, Mark, Josh and Chad were enjoying the show behind them. The energy was at its highest that night and Dead Curse gave the best performance in months and so did the Chilies. Josh seemed happier on stage.

An after party awaited for them and Anastasia felt kind of bad at the end of the night because she set all her attention on Jacob, they even danced some songs like they used to in London when they were teenagers, while Josh just chatted with friends. But they both agreed on spending the night together so after a shower and a change into more cozy clothes she went to his room.

-          You looked great on that stage tonight – He said to her while the two were sitting on a couch.

-          Really? It was an amazing show, we sounded good as hell! – Anastasia said with enthusiasm – The Peppers did a great show too but that is an obvious statement.

-          That guy, Jacob, seems fun – Josh said suddenly.

-          I’ve known Jacob since we were eight years old. We were neighbors back in London. We always played together and our moms were friends, he has been a great support during my whole life.

-          That’s good I guess.

-          Since you’ve been Googling my name you must have read that we were in a relationship once, but that is in the past and we were never actually in a real relationship. At sixteen or seventeen you don’t even know what a relationship is.

-          I haven’t Googled you – he said laughing.

-          Why are you laughing then?

-          Because it’s funny – Anastasia jumped on him and started to tickle him. Both were laughing badly when Anastasia’s phone rang.  

It was a message from Mandy that read “They never get enough” and a link was attached. Anastasia knew what it was all about before she even opened it, but she did it anyways. Another pink website appeared with a report of her and Jacob all over each other in Chicago. She got frustrated and angry.

-          When are they gonna stop? – She asked.

-          What happened? – She handed the phone to Josh. He looked at it with the most stoic face expression – This sucks - His face now showed sadness – It’s the same thing that happened in the Netherlands for Pinkpop – He left the phone in a near table and got up the couch – I don’t feel comfortable with this Anastasia.

-          You think I do? I’ve been working my ass off to have the lowest profile I can my entire life.

-          Well you haven’t worked hard enough – Anastasia looked into Josh’s eyes not believing the words that had come out of his mouth.

-          Excuse me? – He didn’t repeat them – Well I’m sorry if my last name brought this entire load which I cannot get rid of. It’s not like I’m a fucking Kardashian either, Josh.

-          I just don’t like the exposure.

-          I don’t like it either! – Anastasia was raising her voice – My last name has brought me great things and fame is a price I didn’t ask to pay. I stopped doing all the stupid shit I did when I was a teenager, I stopped talking to a bunch of people because I didn’t like a fucking camera lens in my face anytime I went out, I even stopped going to crowded places in LA, I don’t go to many red carpets anymore.

-          I don’t feel comfortable with that aspect of your life. I had a taste of it in the Netherlands and I have the feeling it’s never gonna go away – After Josh’s words, Anastasia didn’t know how to act.

-          I’m just gonna leave. I don’t really know how to handle this right now.

He didn’t stop her. She just left to her room with anger all over her system. Luckily for her she found Steph on the way to her room.

-          Darling, what happened? – Anastasia saw her and started to cry. She was a tough cookie and not many things made her cry, but this situation got into her nerves. She couldn’t control what others wrote about her and she learned that after lots and lots of years in therapy. The fact that Josh wasn’t supportive and just decided to get rid of her because of such a dumb thing really broke her.

Stephanie helped her to get to her room and Mandy was inside.

-          Oh God, An! – Mandy said and ran to hold her friend.

Once she was sitting in a bed, Anastasia told them about all the things that were said in Josh’s room.

-          The thing is that I know how Josh is. I told Mark a long time ago: I have a lot of “Hollywood baggage” – Anastasia said wiping the tears from her face.

-          But that does not justify Josh's behavior! – Steph said – When I started to date your brother, people said disgusting things too, especially fans all over the word, but that didn’t keep me from being with him because I loved him and I knew he loved me and that was all that mattered. He knows who you are and where you come from, he can’t expect things like this aren’t going to happen.

-          Do you remember all the things that people said about you and Jacob? – Mandy said - And all the dead threats you received because people thought you were a couple? That was bullshit and you really learned from that. I know how much you’ve tried to keep a low profile, but the truth is, that is never going to happen, because of your last name and because of our band.

-          Josh doesn’t understand that – Anastasia said – I hate this “Celebrity status”.

-          All that should matter to him is that you are real, and that you are not in this business just because you want fame, because you know how shitty fame is. You are here because you love what you do and it’s important to you to express yourself through music, and if he can’t see all the light you radiate and the great aspects about you then he can go fuck himself – Stephanie said.

-          The most stupid thing is that you are both angry for something you have in common: obsession with privacy – Mandy said and Anastasia felt gratitude for having people like them in her life.

Read chapter 11

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic 79: A Christmas Adventure (1983)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! Welcome back to another Christmas at “The Adventure Gamer” where we are looking at our sixth holiday adventure game! Time flies while we are having so much fun and I’m just amazed that we keep finding new holiday adventures to play. This time out will be 1983’s A Christmas Adventure, a “bitCard” (more on that in a bit) by Chartscan Data, Inc. This game has two notable distinctions: First, it is the earliest Christmas game that I have found so far. Merry Christmas from Melbourne House and A Spell of Christmas Ice were both 1984 games, but this one is a full year earlier. This may be the first commercially released Christmas adventure ever, but we’ll keep looking for more. Second, this game was brought to us by you! Last year, we ran a brief GoFundMe to purchase the only available-to-the-public copy of the game from Retrogames. Our community pitched in some funds and we purchased and sent the game off to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, they were unable to get the game imaged for the holidays and we detoured to Humbug instead. The archivists uploaded our game in January and that gave us plenty of time to review it for this Christmas.

The Christmas Adventure story begins in Montreal, Quebec at the home of Frank Winstan. It was spring or early summer 1983 and he was working on an idea to design and sell personalized software as an electronic holiday or greeting card. You wouldn’t just play an adventure game, you’d play a game that knew your name and would have personalized messages and other features set by your friends or family. Even in the 1980s, the holiday card industry was hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly sales; if they could tap even a tiny portion, the upside would be huge. In part due to a fear that someone else could capitalize on a similar idea first, he set his sights on a Christmas release for his first electronic “bitCard”. Even for the fast development cycles of early games, the timing was incredibly tight and made all the more so due to a lack of marketing or distribution infrastructure. Winstan needed to bootstrap a startup and ship their first product in less than five months. Was that even possible?

The software retailed for approximately $45 in today’s money.

Winstan had been advised by others that his timeline was too tight, but he enlisted the help of a Larry Callahan, a friend from Vanier College, and they set to work. Chartscan Data was born! Winstan was a psychology professor and he did not have experience with adventure games. Nonetheless, he and Callahan established a system where he (and Ron Sperber) wrote the scenario, Callahan built much of the initial Apple II version, and other programmers were brought on board for porting and other work. Callahan wrote the software in a combination of BASIC and 6502 assembly for speed and size. To make an impossible task even harder, Winstan targeted five separate 6502-based systems, each with their own versions of BASIC and other platform dependencies, all needing to ship at the same time.

While Callahan and others built the product, Winstan built the company. Time was against him. Despite marketing copy that said the game would go on sale in October, he only officially incorporated his company that September. Winstan’s role was to ferry code and documentation between the contracted programmers, develop marketing relationships and ship copies of his near-completed game for reviews, as well as write and type-set all of the documentation, and just about everything else. The coding wasn’t entirely going according to plan either and with only a month to go, he was still placing “help wanted” ads in the McGill University newspaper looking for experienced 6502 programmers. He reports that he frequently slept only two hours per night to keep all of the gears turning. Christmas was, in a very real sense, coming!

Judging by the date on this review, you would be correct to surmise that they made it! Chartscan Data released their first product on time, but not quite everything had fallen into place. Given the schedule, there was insufficient time to produce or distribute a boxed version of the game or to develop relationships for the same. Instead, all sales were to be via mail order. Winstan had managed to get seven or eight (by his report) reviews published, but these were in the holiday issues of various computing magazines. Between the delays inherent in print publication and the challenges of a mail-order only business model, there was a slim window where readers could purchase the game and ensure that it arrived in time for Christmas with all of the customizations inact. Samples were sent to computer stores, but this was not the perfect harmony of distribution and marketing that Winstan’s e-cards needed to be successful.

The Apple II edition of “A Christmas Adventure”

I’d love to report that A Christmas Adventure was the surprise hit of 1983, but that distinction falls to Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids. They made their Christmas delivery, but ultimately the timeline and budget were too tight to build a distribution pipeline to reach the masses by Christmas morning. Less than a thousand copies were sold that first year, plunging Chartscan Data into debt and ultimately bankruptcy. Having played the game (as you will soon read), they did not fail for lack of either effort or a good idea. Winstan’s concept of personalized games as gifts was a remarkable leap in 1983! In fact, I would assert (without adequate proof or research, mind you) that he is likely the unsung inventor of the “e-card”. I hope that he and his team look back on this failure with a certain amount of pride.

As a final coda on this part of our story, Winstan tells me that The Sloane Report, a Miami-based newsletter focusing on software in education, named A Christmas Adventure as their co-game of the year in 1984. Of course, this recognition came too late for the Christmas season, but it hinted that there may still have been life in the product after all. Although Chartscan Data had gone under, a new Bitcards, Inc. emerged through the magic of business and financial wizardry. Winstan taught himself BASIC and continued the development of A Christmas Adventure himself, releasing a “2.0” edition in time for Christmas 1984. This is the version that I played in my review. He continued updating and selling the game through Christmas 1986 with the final version being tagged as version 2.8. He tells me that he nearly had an agreement for a boxed edition of the game, but at that late stage the industry was shifting towards IBM PCs and that was not a platform that he or his team envisioned supporting. In the end, no other Bitcards were created and the company was eventually folded. Winstan and Callahan continued their careers at Vanier College. Winstan taught Psychology, while Callahan ran their IT Support Services (a role that is very dear to my heart!).

Frank Winstan in the 1980s.

This title has become exceedingly rare. Unlike so much of the early Commodore and Apple II software library, the game was never picked up by the BBS community or the abandonware forums. Very few copies were known to survive. For many years, the only known version was one of Winstan’s “sampler” demos sent to computer stores, documented by AppleAdventures in 2015. This version included 50% of the story and a “mini-customizer” so that you could see how your personalization would affect the story. AppleAdventures was later able to get his (or her?) hands on an original full version by 2018 and produced a “Let’s Play” video of it on Youtube, but I was unable to convince him to give us a copy to review. When I speak of the differences in the 1983 version below, I am comparing to his earlier efforts in documenting the game.

The version that I played for review was Winstan’s “version 2.0” edition with a 1984 copyright date. This update incorporated a few new puzzles and cleaned up old ones, added a bit more music, and redid some of the item names and text descriptions. This is the version available today on the Internet Archive and, I believe, the version that we purchased last year in our GoFundMe promotion.

Before I begin, I want to thank Frank Winstan and Larry Callahan for their kind cooperation in my review of their work. I can only imagine what it is like to have strange people email you about something that you did thirty-six years ago, but to their credit they have been incredibly forthcoming with details and anecdotes about the development of the game. It is to my great shame that I only incorporated around a third of the historical details that they provided me. I am also exceedingly grateful for Frank for sending along a copy of the manual and offering to mail me a pristine Apple II version for my review. I was unable to take him up on that given the time constraints– I suspect rushing right before Christmas is a feeling that he is familiar with!– but appreciate it nonetheless.

Very nice “3D” rendering of flying towards the palace; quite advanced for 1983!

Introductory Movie

The game opens with an extended cinematic, very unusual for a game of this era and well-done over all. The camera flies over a darkened North Pole snow field towards Santa’s Ice Palace. We are taken inside to Santa’s office. A “greetings” message on the wall appears to be customizable. I’m not positive who is narrating, but they have “chatted” with Santa’s computer many times before and refer to us, the viewer and player, as a “poor mortal”.

Something is amiss? What can it be?

OMG. Who could it be?

  Suddenly, an alert appears on the computer: Santa is missing! With only a few hours before Christmas, the computer springs into action to figure out what to do. It searches its worldwide naughty-and-nice database to locate someone that can help. That someone… is you! My version has the name set as “Current Player” although this also is customizable.

With that, we are instructed to flip over the disk and begin.

Presumably the Apple logo was also customizable.

Playing the Game

We start the game where the cinematic ended, in Santa’s “Ice Palace”. The greeting message from the opening is still there, but the safe that was clearly visible before is now covered by an Apple painting. I’d wager that was either customizable as well, or at least changed based on which platform you were running. Is that a hint? Yes! We can move the painting to reveal the safe, although it is keyed to only let Santa open it. A strange parser issue shows up immediately in that the “waste basket” is spelled “was’basket”, presumably because the word was too long. You have to be careful as “basket” isn’t recognized as a synonym. I’ll have to be on the lookout for these sorts of things.

When we look at the desk and chair, we get the message that they “cannot be manipulated in any way” and “this is not a trick”. The 1983 edition of the game doesn’t mention them at all and I am not sure what was gained by adding them in except to fill out the room.

In terms of customization, the 1983 video that I viewed has the game brought to us by “Frostbyte Computers” while my version says “Apple User Magazine”. Apple User was a magazine published in the 1980s by Database Publications, although beyond that I am not deeply familiar with it. Frostbyte is a name that is used by far too many companies over the years and I am unclear which one this referred to. In both cases, my guess is that these are companies that Frank Winstan worked with to promote the game. I do not know what a straight-from-the-factory edition of the game would have said.

In addition to the vault, we also have a computer that wants us to insert both a system and a data disk (oh, the 1980s!) and we can pick up the waste basket.

Made in Canada!

  My first task is to explore the house and see what I find. Rather than narrate through every room one-by-one, let me summarize:

To the north is Santa’s Workshop, complete with a map of Canada! I grab a shovel, but the crafting tools are too delicate to be picked up by my fingers. I pull aside the rug to reveal a key. I ignore the stairs down for now.

In the northwest of the palace is Santa’s minimalist art gallery: only a single painting adorns the wall. Moving it causes me to be attacked by “cursed elves”. That triggers a brief action scene, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do except watch as they ransack the place. I am forced to restore already. A window in the room is too high up for me to do anything with it. Will I find a ladder?

West of the office is a living room with a chair and a (very!) hot fireplace. Even looking at the fire kills me, so I’ll avoid that for now. I sit in the chair and discover that it “feels funny”. I remove the cushions and discover a rope that I can add to my collection. A sword over the fireplace seems interesting but I can’t do anything with it.

Further west is an entertainment room with a jukebox and ping-pong table. I pick up a record, but there is no obvious way to play music.

North of the living room is a spartan kitchen containing milk and an empty bag. I nab both.

In the south, I find a bedroom with dressers and closets. One closet contains a surprise Pac-Man cameo while the other has a full set of Santa regalia including boots, a hat, a coat, and gloves. I pocket some coins from the dresser. A second drawer is locked, but my key fits. That contains a disk labeled “chanukah”! Finally, a piece of paper falls out of Santa’s coat that says to call “Current Player” (me!) in the event of an emergency. How did they know I was so good at adventure games!?

Hey look! It’s a cameo!

  That is a lot to digest, but I want to highlight a few things. When you enter that closet in the bedroom, the screen goes black and Pac-Man marches across the screen. When he gets around half way, he discovers that he’s in the wrong game and quickly runs off. It’s bonkers and the first laugh-out-loud moment of the game. I hope we see more examples of the authors’ humor as we play on. It seems impossible, but when this game came out Pac-Man (1980) was very new and “Pac-Man fever” had only just subsided.

Interface-wise, the game is inconsistent whether or not objects disappear when you pick them up. The shovel and key disappear, for example, while the wastebasket does not. Unlike Sierra’s Mystery House-style games, dropped objects only appear when you drop them in the room that they originated in. The parser seems very simple with very few supported synonyms. I’m also fairly sure that it has only three characters of sensitivity, as opposed to the five used by many other early adventures.

Finally, this is the first reference to Chanukah (or “Hanukkah” or any number of equally-valid alternate spellings) in one of our Christmas games! I’ve been hoping to come across a Hanukkah adventure game, but I’m almost certain that none were made in the classic era. The only Hanukkah game that I know of at all is Game of the Maccabees (1983), a little-known action game for the Atari. The earliest Jewish-themed adventure game that I know of is The Pesach Adventure (1993) celebrating Passover. If I ever find a Hanukkah adventure, you can bet your menorah that I’ll find a way to cover it.

If only Amazon could work out how to store 43 million boxes in such a small space!

  Just beneath the workshop is the “gift storage room” where we can see piles of gifts for the good little boys and girls in the world. Looking at them triggers a database-style interface where I can theoretically learn the gifts of all 43,126,798 good children, but for simplicity we can only see the first eight entries. While 43 million seems like a big number, there were 63 million children in the United States alone in 1983. Were the rest naughty? And what about all the good children everywhere else in the world? And did I spend more time than I should researching historical census data? The answer to the last question is “yes”.

We can look at the presents, but only a couple of them seem valuable. Presents #1, #5, #6, and #8 all teleport me somewhere around the castle when I look at them. I’m not clear why. Present #3 is apparently “curtains” and thanks to the magic of an overly-destructive pun, I die and have to restore. #7 is the present for me that I will get at the end of the game. The only presents of value are #4, a doll that I can pick up, and #2, a rhyme:

I was talking to a computer ace Her name, it was Veronica I said, “Hi Ronny- what’s the word?” She said, “The word is Chanukah!”

With two references to Hanukkah in the last couple of minutes, I think that will be important later.

The 1983 game has a completely different puzzle here. In the opening cinematic, there is a brief display of Santa’s gift list. For some reason, Susie’s present is listed in that opening but left blank here. Somehow this is supposed to clue you in that you can pick up (“get doll”) in this room. Regardless of how you get it, the doll is pull-string and intones, “Mommy says that you have to keep warm when you are sick.” Could that be a clue?

The sleigh is pointed in an inconvenient direction, don’t you think?

  Past the gift room is the empty reindeer stables and a garage containing Santa’s sleigh. With neither reindeer to pull it, nor jolly old man to steer it, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I do find a blanket that I can grab. By this point, I’m out of inventory space and storing things elsewhere but you get the idea.

With no more rooms in the Ice Palace, I resolve to solve some puzzles. The first is easy: Santa’s security system is fooled by wearing his clothes and that gets me access to his safe. Inside is an unlabeled potion. I can also insert the “chanukah” disk in the computer, but it still needs a second before it will boot. (Weren’t old-timey computers so quaint?) It takes some time and experimentation, but I realize that the record from the jukebox is referred to as “floppy” in its description. That makes no sense at all, but the computer boots when I (somehow?) insert it, so what do I know?

On startup, the computer asks for a password so I take the most obvious guess: “chanukah”. It works! Only a moron would write the password on the disk itself, but my wager is that Santa isn’t the most clued in to digital security. Wait until he gets his whole “naughty” list hacked one of these years! The computer displays a menu with four options:

The first is the gift list, but it doesn’t appear to be useful. The list does not match what is in the store room; the doll is the same, but the third gift is a bicycle and not (evil) curtains.

The second and third options are “need to know” and the computer somehow thinks I don’t need to know yet. When I need to “cure elf maladies” or render “reindeer first aid”, I’ll know where to look for answers.

The final option describes an emergency exit from the palace. It reveals that during an emergency (like this one), the castle is automatically sealed to prevent anyone entering or leaving. However, there is one way out via a “virtually empty” room, although it involves fastening together two common items hidden elsewhere. To make it trickier, one of the items is in a “different time plane”. Is there time travel in this game? My guess is that the rope is one of the items, but what is the second?

The 1983 edition has the computer with the same password, but without the menu. Instead, it gives you a (unnecessary, in my case) clue to access the vault.

Catch the elves in color!

  This is where I get stuck and I eventually watch the 1983 video to see what I missed. The next puzzle that I could solve was the “cursed elves”. I had not noticed that if I opened up the painting while carrying the bag, my action scene would be different. Now, I can control the bag with the arrow keys to capture as many elves as possible. It was more difficult than it looks! For one thing, the elves can move diagonally while I can only move up and down or left and right. Even leaving one behind ends the game and it took me a few tries to capture them all. Once I did, I discovered that I captured seven bad elves and one good one. I have to play over again to try to leave one of the green elves and this adds another layer to the difficulty as the green ones seem to kamikaze whenever I get close. After a few frustrating attempts, I work out that the striped elf is the “good” one (not the plain green one) and seal the deal.

This puzzle is clearer in the black-and-white version of the game as all of the elves wearing vertical stripes are evil while the one with horizontal stripes is not.

Catch the elves in black and white!

  Once we work out the correct elf to keep and get lucky with the arcade sequence, the final elf appears in the room with me. Unfortunately, all of the evil magic has made him ill (an elf malady!) and I can now consult the computer to see what to do. The computer tells me that I need to feed the elf the potion and to keep him warm. I hand over the potion and blanket and he’s right as rain again. The elf turns out to be the leader elf and is happy to follow me around from room to room. I am not clear how to solve this puzzle in the 1983 edition of the game as there is no computer hint. I believe that the doll’s advice was supposed to clue you in to give him the blanket, but I am uncertain what may have clued you in to needing the potion as well.

With the elf in tow, I can pick up the tools in Santa’s Workshop since he can carry them for me.

I fail to notice at first, but you can walk through the hole where the evil elves poured through. This leads to a dark tunnel and then to a time machine! See? I knew there would be time travel here eventually. The original edition of the game has a small maze in place of the tunnel, but since I’m just watching a video I have no idea how difficult it was.

This time machine has a Y2K problem.

  Even with the time machine, I am immediately stuck again. The 1983 video just shows the elf activating the machine when you enter the room and look at it, but that doesn’t happen in the 1984 version. I have to solve this myself. Before I get too far, let me admit that this was multiple hours of experimentation with a little bit of “reading the source code” included. Only a small portion of the game is written in BASIC and I was unable to find anything relevant, but that tells you how desperate I was. Given the rarity of this game, I do not believe a “request for assistance” would have been useful!

If I only had the manual when I played!

  This is when I discovered the “help” feature and boy is it robust! This is all clearly laid out in the manual, but I did not get my hands on a copy (thanks again to Mr. Winstan!) prior to playing. By typing “help”, you can request general information (such as a list of verbs that the game understands) or more specific information about the room that you are in. You can even decrease the difficulty of the elf capture game! This is a great feature, made slightly worse by all of the disk swapping that you have to do to access it. This was likely quite easy on a real system, but my emulator did not handle the disk swapping correctly (probably because the game writes its state to the disks?) and so I had to restore after receiving the hint. I will blame this on modernity rather than a bug in the original. The two hints for the time machine room are cryptic:

“He is his name and his name is like he. Get his attention- that’s the key!”

“Only someone who is small by design can help you slip through the cracks of time.”

Both clues point to the elf as the solution, but I only stumble on the answer by accident. We can, it turns out, issue commands directly to the elf by typing “elf” by itself. That brings up a second prompt to tell him what to do. You can even type “help” again and he’ll give you his own clues! In this case, he tells us to examine the time machine. I had done that already, but now I tell him to examine the machine. This reveals that there is a keyhole in the back.

I know I missed something because I never learned that the time machine was broken, but if you tell the elf to “fix timemachine” when he is carrying the tools, he does so and we are whisked back to the past.

I had thought that this strange syntax for asking the elf to do something would have been in the manual, but it turns out that it is not. My manual is for a later update to the game and perhaps this puzzle was tweaked again, but as it stands I found this to be the most frustrating part of the game so far. Being able to issue commands to the elf is a great feature! It opens up tons of puzzle mechanics and was implemented very well in the Zork series, for example. I am not aware of any other games using this syntax and I wish that it would have been mentioned in the manual.

Prehistoric!

  With my complaints out of the way, I travel back to the year “1”. (The current year was “8X”, but I’m not going to nit pick this two-digit year too much. I expect there were more than just cave paintings in the year 1901!) When we are in the past, the interface doesn’t really work because– somehow this makes sense– we are in an era before computers existed and therefore we cannot tell our computer to do stuff for us. Fortunately, the elf traveled with us and we know how to control him so it all works out. It’s clever but reminds us that we are working through an avatar. We learn that the cave paintings are done by an ancient Evil One and that he is the one that put the elves under a spell. Did he make Santa and the reindeer disappear as well? I discover a hook hidden under a pile of bones and grab that before heading back to the present.

The 1983 version of the puzzle is different.

  In the original version, the time machine is easier to activate as I stated previously, but also takes you to a different era. This is the only example of changed art that I see so far between the 1983 and 1984 games. Rather than going prehistoric, we seem to go somewhere else. The dial remains on “83” so I am glad that this sequence was rewritten for clarity. We still pick up a hook in the past (behind a painting rather than in a pile of bones) and then travel back to the present.

With the hook and rope together, I can create a grappling hook! I throw that to the window in the art gallery and I am able to leave the Ice Palace for the first time. I’m not even going to mention that we were on the second floor.

Just because my nose glows… I just don’t fit in.

  I have been reluctant to mention this before now because I am not sure what is the game and what is the emulator, but I have been struggling with infrequent lockups. I’ve never lost more than a few minutes, but from this point on the game suddenly becomes much less stable. By the time I reach the end in a few minutes from now, I’ll be carefully plotting every move and avoiding actions (like checking our inventory!) that can trigger a crash. I push through, but if these bugs were in the original then I am not sure how much patience the players would have had for this. I’m going to assume that the bugs are due to emulaton and possibly due to my use of save states rather than saving to disk as intended.

I emerge outside. To the west is a snow bank. I dig with the shovel and discover that Rudolph was trapped under the snow! He’s suffering from the extreme cold and his nose has turned orange rather than red; apparently that also means that the other reindeer will not recognize him. Are glowing colored noses so common that they couldn’t put two-and-two together? Sure, Comet and Cupid might be dumb, but Donner and Blitzen could have worked it out. I ask the computer what to do and it tells me that I need to administer a “hot non-alcoholic beverage”. I don’t have any of those yet.

Not the game’s best art.

  Abandoning Rudolph for now, I head east to discover a hut with a loose floorboard. Looking at it tells me that it is “hanging at the window” and I can only assume that it’s a translation error of some kind. It hardly matters because I can move the board to find a path downstairs. Heading down, I discover not only Santa’s secret stash of booze, but also the jolly old elf himself. He’s been tied up, but it is no problem at all to “untie santa” and he heads off on his way. Santa will wait for us by his sleigh.

The final puzzle stumped me for a long time, but I eventually found the “hint” that I needed by hex-editing the game files. I know, I know… I’m a dirty cheater. The 1983 edition of the game just requires you to give the milk to Rudolph, but the 1984 edition wants it to be warm milk. I had guessed as much, but no amount of trying to warm it by the fire seemed to have helped. I eventually noticed an item in the game called “was’bas+mlk”. This revealed that I could put the milk in the basket, then I could put the basket in the fire, and finally I could fish them back out and have warm milk. Make sense? The parser doesn’t handle this very clearly as we cannot remove the milk from the basket when done, but it gets the point across and we can feed the milk to Rudolph. Once back to health, he too went back to Santa’s sleigh.

I race back to the sleign, noticing that there are now reindeer in their stables. Presumably Rudolph gathered them together once he was feeling well. At the sleigh, Santa gives me a present and a message from my friend that gave me the game and heads off on his yearly rounds. I win!

Time Played: 6 hr 35 min

Santa thanks you and leaves for his once-a-year task.

We get our gift (never revealed) and then the game ends with a personalized message.

Final Rating

We made it to the end of another holiday classic! I hope you enjoyed this trip as much as I have. I have a ton of fun researching these holiday games and I hope that comes through. This is a game that has tremendous promise, but for everything that is ahead of its time (the personalization and help system especially), there are some head-scratching moments that a more seasoned game designer would have avoided. The fact that I had enough fun that I was willing to try to hex-edit the game to solve it should be seen as a sign of my enjoyment and desire to reach the end, rather than my frustration.

Every one of our reviews may be someone’s first and that is doubly true for these holiday posts. Let me remind you that we are using our “suspiciously similar” EGGNOG system for review since our usual rating scale doesn’t seem festive enough. Also keep in mind that these scores are based against an idealized version of a circa-1990s LucasArts or Sierra game. Text adventures and early adventures in general do not score all that highly, but this is an indication only of their quality compared to games released more than a decade later. These ratings are designed to be fun and it is generally not a good idea to put too much stock in them.

Let’s get to reviewing:

Enigmas and Solution-Findability – On the whole, I enjoyed the puzzles in this game even though most did not rise above fetch quests around the house. The use of the computer for hints was fantastic, as was everything involved with the Elf, and the creation of the warm milk. Ultimately, those were let down by the primitiveness of the parser but the underlying ideas were solid. The animated arcade sequence was also done well with the right level of charm and frustration; having to work out which elf to save was a nice touch. I am giving extra credit for the robust helpo system which was exceptional for the era and helped to ensure the game remained fun and not frustrating. The rhyming clues ( which I only briefly covered) were some of the game’s best sources of humor. My score: 3

Game UI and Items – As much as I hate to say it, the interface isn’t quite baked yet. A three-character parser with very few synonyms is not great even by 1983 standards and it shows that the developers hadn’t played that many adventure games prior to building this one. If they had better tools, they could have made a better game. Still, the verb list was helpful (even if it felt like an exaggeration) and there are some great features such as the ability to make multiple moves in a single line which are listed in the manual but which I did not discover on my own. My score: 2

Gameworld and Story – The Ice Palace and environs were fun to explore, but they never felt like a real place and the story never coalesced into a full narrative. We never fully understood who our avatar was in the game (an intelligent or magical computer?) and the menace of an Evil One from the dawn of time who plotted something against Santa was a great start, but didn’t go anywhere and didn’t have any impact on the ending of the game. It feels like there were plot beats missing. Who tied up Santa? How did Rudolph end up trapped in the snow? Did we ever cure all of those cursed elves? My score: 1

Noises and Pretty Pixels – This game gives us both a Christmas soundtrack and some excellent art, including a surprisingly nice opening animation. A few of the locations weren’t drawn as well as the others, but the little touches ranging from Pac-Man’s cameo to the catch-the-elves game were done very well. My score: 3

Overworld and Environs – In our normal rating system, we refer to this category as “Atmosphere” and it describes how the game made you feel. Was it tense? Did the setting evoke strong emotions? Did it all come together in an indescribable way? Unfortunately, I have to say that while the game was good and had some nice bits of levity, the overall tone wasn’t consistent. I may have felt differently if I had used the help system more or if the rhymes were integrated into the game itself. My score: 2

Gregariousness and Thespianism – This category refers to the game’s text and I’m very much in a split-decision. On one hand, the room descriptions were spartan and a few object names had strange contractions. And yet, some of the jokes landed, the computer interfaces were nice, and the help system was robust and clever with lots of rhyming clues that most players would never see. I loved those rhyming clues! My score: 2.

Before we add it all up, I want to add one bonus point for being customizable. I was considering deducting points for the crashes, but as I am uncertain whether that was my game or the emulator, I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt.

Finally tally: (3+2+1+3+2+2)/.6+1 = 23 points!

Honestly, that feels about right. This is another case where the game is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is in good company with several of our other Christmas games, as well as Brian Moriarty’s early work. I am positive that the Bitcards team would have continued to improve had they remained in the industry. With a slightly better engine, they could have done wonders. Even so, it seems likely that Frank Winstan invented the computer greeting card.

I might be stretching things a bit, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that Winstan’s game inspired the release of Merry Christmas from Melbourne House the following year. While they were Australian (but releasing games in the US and UK) and it seems unlikely that they played this one, a particularly inscrutable joke in that game was that you could only exit Santa’s workshop via a window. We may never know if these events are connected, but I have my suspicions.

If you are looking for even more Christmas-gaming fun, please check out our previous holiday specials:

Merry Christmas from Melbourne House (1984)

A Spell of Christmas Ice (1984)

Crisis at Christmas (1986)

Elves ‘87 (aka Elf’s Christmas Adventure) (1987)

Humbug (1990)

As for me, I’ll be taking a break until the new year when I will resume our Infocom marathon (finally!) with Trinity. See you in 2020!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-79-a-christmas-adventure-1983/

[violetsystems]

 #personal

I don’t think anybody expected me to go out last night.  I’m not really connected enough anymore on social media to know what there was to do really.  There were a full set of keys to my apartment and facilities.  I started off the New Year three loads of laundry lighter.  The laundry room is directly below the stairs to my apartment.  I’ve been walking three blocks with a suitcase for months to do my wash.  Back and forth.  I got really good at rolling that suitcase around.  Ironically I’m not bringing much of any baggage to New York next weekend.  Metaphysically speaking or otherwise.  I spent most of last night thinking about what I was going to wear.  I bought a lot of nice clothes this year on the low mostly from resellers.  The fact I have two options for a jacket is a focal point for me.  I was wearing that Nike Puffa on a particularly warm day last week.  I caught up with a friend who is a bike messenger on a leisurely long walk home from work.  They commented how my jacket must have been warm on a day like this.  It didn’t feel hostile but more a matter of fact.  I looked at the weather yesterday.  I look at it every day mostly from when I used to fixate on whether I could take the weather outside enough to run.  It’ll be in the mid forties all next weekend.  The last thing I want to do is walk around New York looking overheated and thirsty.  The thirstiness at this point is inevitable.  But these are the minutia I have the luxury of stressing about when it comes to a weekend getaway by myself at the turn of the year.  My dad texted me at nine with one of those fireworks messages.  That was about the only text I got.  Everybody knows I only pay attention to my dash here when it comes to meaningful social engagement.  I definitely didn’t wake up this morning regretting much of anything other than my choice of gym routine yesterday.  I decided to take today off maybe much in the same thought process as that Puffa jacket.  It’s kind of a tired look under the circumstances of today.  My apartment is the cleanest and most organized it has ever been.  I spent all yesterday filing vinyl from my collection.  It sounds more pretentious than it was.  But I was alone and it was peaceful.  Imagine if you were away from someone you loved and it tore you apart every minute.  Now imagine if it tore you apart for an entire six months.  I’ve never heard of the opposite being true until it occurred to me.  I’m the one sitting here six months later at a very different point of my life.  At least all my DNA is present and accounted for as we start the new year.  I am very much the same Tim with the same feelings on the Internet.  Let’s give it up for consistency.

I have been watching a lot of movies over vacation.  Mostly just purchasing stuff I’ve wanted to see.  A lot of modern and contemporary science fiction lately has been favorite.  I watched Annihilation last night.  A larger mystery has been why I enjoy that specifically in my own home.  How I got a couch in here in the first place?  How I have a larger tv to watch them with?  How I have time set aside to enjoy them without feeling like my life is spiraling out of control?  I have a job.  You would think people would understand that is how you afford all these things.  That you actually have to put in work to receive the money to make those purchases.  There’s probably other ways.  But mine is fairly predictable with a fair amount of benefits.  Particularly a whole week off and six more weeks of vacation to take before July.  Last year around April I went to Asia probably for the last time in awhile by myself.  I learned a lot from that trip.  More than I particularly bargained for maybe back then.  But knowing what I know now, maybe I learned how to better focus myself.  I know now at least how many years I’ve been trying to get back to center.  I know how much at peace I am when I close the door.  Now that I have keys.  All of them.  How did I lose them in the first place?  Why did it take so long to get them?  Why did I get hustled out of my Christmas and Birthday money to get a copy?  Was it worth it?  All of this?  Does anybody really know at the end of the day how much I sacrificed this year let alone the last two?  The answer is yes.  Many people do.  One person in particular probably knows it much clearer than anybody else.  I care about that person enough to know they understand the weight of that.  Why I act like I do?  Why I make these decisions and move quietly.  Why people who think they understand me never have a clue.  The heaviness that follows me everywhere I go these days.  I haven’t really suffered all that much under the weight of it.  Sometimes it’s like an invisible pressure around your shoulders nestled deep into your neck.  You stretch with it.  Stand up straighter against it and it coils around you tighter.  You can’t escape your fate this much we’ve come to know from life.  When something mirrors everything you do out of sight like a shadow.  How much of it is planned and how much of it is magic and chaos?  It depends on the environment.  And home alone on New Year’s Day there’s a lot of things I can control without leaving my house.  Particularly how positive I am about how hard I try and how disappointed I am nobody within a fifty mile radius has the capacity to care.

Maybe it isn’t all that unlike being trapped under a dome.  There’s a lot of subtext to that movie I enjoy very much.  The fact that the main character manages to hold it together literally and why.  The echoes of relationships in the movie that are both human and inhuman at the same time.  The blur between people’s acceptance of their fate being positive or negative.  When Tessa Thompson’s character vanishes in such a nuanced way, you understand that fate and change is inevitable.  At the end, who is facing who exactly.  Who is the real enemy?  What will we be remade into post Annihilation?  I swear I’m not trying to make this post a parable for you to quit drinking or anything.  What people turned into was largely based on the chaos of evolution through a prism.  The scene where they are being hunted by something that has the power to throw their friend’s voice  is particularly disturbing poetry.  How we can’t be sure if that’s a memory, a part of their friend, or a manipulation to evoke a reaction from it’s prey.  In the end, what holds us together in this nightmare world is our consistency.  Our love for each other and our capacity to understand the subtext in this blur.  In an era that flaunts the term post truth like it’s a revelation, we all know reality is subjective.  People lie.  People warp their own narratives of people, places and things.  History vanishes and mutates.  Scenes fade out and in like passing tides.  What keeps pushing me forward has been my own account of events.  My own narrative.   One largely here that has been pretty open and transparent to a point.  My own dreams and desires that I refract out into the world much like a prism and all the mutant and alien perspectives form therein. But there’s a wall of intimacy there nobody seems to be able to cross.  It’s intentional.  It’s how I express my love and intimacy.  And it’s behind a physical door where I sleep and dream every night.  One where the peace and quiet speaks volumes to me.  My apartment is much like this blog sometimes.  I’m trapped in an echo chamber.  Being alone this year with my thoughts and dreams didn’t feel so far away at all.  I spent a lot of time making coffee here in the kitchen every morning thinking about what it would take.  To be good enough.  Whether or not I was happy resigning myself to this fate that’s already been in motion nearly half of 2018.  I’ve held it all together pretty well.  I’ll keep holding it together here at the lighthouse.  At least my DNA is all present and accounted for.  That’s a really positive way to start 2019.  It means my love for you is just the same as it was last year.  And it’s locked behind these doors for the foreseeable future.  And I have the keys.  Only you have the keys to my heart.  I’m going to keep my genomes in a safe place for the time being.  Off the internet, out of public and safe here under the dome.  If you can’t follow the light.  Just be the lighthouse.  I hear they have some crazy dance battles in there.  <3 Tim

[woodworkingpastor]

Wasting time God’s way Esther 4:1-17 December 9, 2018 Second Sunday of Advent

People of God, Esther was a heroic woman who took a great risk to bring peace for her people.

          We want peace to overcome struggle, violence, and cruelty.

It can be dangerous to call for peace.

          This might be the job God needs us to do.

Today we light a candle to symbolize God’s peace. We hope in the One who will come. We pray for God’s peace to prevail.

 Hymn  While we are waiting, come # 1032, v. 2                                

People of God, take courage.

             We take courage from the light of God’s peace.

Part of the wonder of Christmas morning is learning what we don’t know: what is inside the packages underneath the Christmas tree. This was especially true when you were a child, but I hope none of us ever lose the sense of wonder and surprise and love that is a gift on Christmas morning.

But there is more to what we don’t know than just what is inside the package, because the value of the gift increases by the value of the relationship with the giver. Suddenly a gift that might otherwise have little value becomes a treasure, because the thought, the love, even the sacrifice add value to what is inside.

We lose a lot when we don’t invest in relationships that yield gifts of one kind or another. And perhaps the saddest thing about these losses is that we never know that we missed these things.

In today’s text we meet Esther, a young Jewish woman who quite literally wins a lottery that took the form of a national beauty pageant. But instead of getting one of those big checks, Esther became queen.  Soon after this, however, national attitudes turned against the Jewish people and the king is tricked into issuing a decree to kill all of the Jews in that land.  It is a threat that is as big and as real as the Holocaust was in 1930’s and 40’s Germany.

But the storyteller doesn’t leave us without hope. Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, learns of this decree and tells Esther that she is in a position to do something about this.  Person and position and circumstances have aligned in Esther; her Jewish identity is unknown to her husband, the king; she seems to be the hope for the Jewish people.

Sermons and studies of Esther normally focus on the very clear challenge Mordecai gives to Esther: “Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”  It’s a great challenge, magnified by the fact that nothing in the story to this point suggests that Esther is has it in her to rise to the challenge. To this point she has been a compliant pawn in other people’s games.

But that’s where the mystery of the gift starts to become apparent. Odds are that something terrible is going to happen. History repeats this story in one form or another regularly. Something terrible is probably going to happen; but something wonderful might happen if Esther will connect the gift of her position and the relationship with the One who put her there. But she’ll never know what that is unless she takes a step of faith.

As the story unfolds, Esther decides to act and the Jewish people are saved. It’s a great story, but it’s not what I want us to see this morning. There is a detail in Esther’s actions that is so unexpected that we might read over it: her first action is to essentially do nothing. Instead, she calls for a three-day fast.  It is an invitation to waste time—but waste time in the most Godly fashion possible.

“Wasting time” in prayer and silence

It’s an important detail because it is unlike us to respond in this way. When confronted with a problem, most of us are of such disposition and ability that we immediately begin thinking of ways to fix the problem: we buy this or build that or talk to this person or donate money or start a program or organization. We are predisposed to solve problems and sometimes we actually get some amazing things done.

But when we pray the Lord’s Prayer in worship, have you ever noticed that we pray “thy kingdom come…” before we pray “give us this day our daily bread”? Have you ever wondered why that is? Have you ever thought about what Jesus meant when he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you”?  Maybe our lives and relationships will work better if God reorients our wants and wishes and desires first, instead of focusing our best efforts on the ways we want to live our lives.

Esther calling a fast before acting on this desperate situation is a lesson to us that there is a better option that just charging off to solve a problem that presents itself. Fasting—which simply means not eating—and prayer pulls us away from the noise, away from the routine, away from our desires to obtain and consume daily bread (and every other need and product under the sun) to instead be shaped by the values of the Kingdom of God.

One time I sought out the advice of a very good friend on a matter, and his counsel was to sit with me in silence for an hour of prayer.  In its way, that hour of prayer was every bit as significant as a long run can be in training for a race. In the silence the Spirit reveals attitudes and biases and prejudices and blind spots that go unnoticed in the normal routine of life.

“Wasting time” listening to others

Prayer and fasting can be an opportunity to come to terms with our powerlessness.  We don’t know everything; we can’t fix everything. But when we slow down and encounter God in the silence of prayer and fasting we begin to learn what we don’t know; to imagine what we’d never dreamed of; to understand those things that are only obtainable when we pay attention to both the gift and the giver.

There is another way we can “waste time” in a spiritually productive way; by listening to people who have life experiences that are different from ours and investing ourselves in ways that allow the Kingdom of God to be revealed in their lives.

An article in the magazine Christian Century tells the story of a small town that had a lot of kids who liked to ride skateboards. Skateboarders are often at odds with the powers-that-be, because skateboarding can do a certain amount of damage to places not designed for that use.  This town’s solution to their so-called “skateboarding problem” was to ban skateboarding nearly everywhere and treat the kids as lawbreakers.

But a pastor in town knew some of these young people, and she sought the rest of them out. After listening to them for a while, she convinced her church to build a skate park on their property and to also get to know the kids. It took a lot of hard work but resulted in a number of the young persons coming to know Christ.

When we listen to others, we find out ways things are broken and, like Esther, we can begin to realize the ways that person and position and circumstances begin to align in our lives. With the right combination of patience and boldness, we can begin to disrupt business as usual, so that the Kingdom of God might be revealed right in the middle of our lives, and our homes, and our communities.  

One of the best gifts Christians can give the world is our being a non-anxious presence in the midst of our communities. We might begin to ask ourselves a few questions: Where are we not supposed to be? Who are we not supposed to be talking to? What are we learning when we’re there? When we “waste time” in the way God desires, what changes in our lives?

Eugene Peterson tells the story of when he and his wife learned they would be grandparents for the first time.  He says “Within days we were driving the two hours to Princeton Seminary where his son and daughter in law were students. Jan was excited, brimming was anticipation. But I wasn’t feeling much of anything. We had three children of our own, I didn’t see why this was so special—and there were still six months before we would see the baby. As we got closer to greeting them Jan’s anticipation heightened, but somehow this pregnancy hadn’t penetrated my emotions. I felt dull, flat, routine.

Driving back home the next day, I complained of my lack of emotion. ‘What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I feel anything?” Jan said, “It’s because you’ve never been pregnant.”

“Well that’s just great; so what am I going to do about that?”

She told me to build a cradle.

When we got home I went to the public library and found pictures of cradles. I decided on an early American hooded cradle, sketched out plans, went to a specialty woods shop, examined the stock and chose some Honduras mahogany. Most afternoons I came home an hour or so early from my parish duties to my shop and worked on that cradle. I decided to finish it with applications of tung oil. I worked on each piece of cradle with the finest grade of sandpaper, over and over. I then went to fine steel wool, over and over. Each application of tung oil deepened the color; after several applications it seemed like the wood glowed from within. I worked with each piece of the cradle, shaping it, holding it, rubbing it, over and over and over—and all the time anticipating the baby that would be in that cradle, over and over and over. Jan’s prescription worked: I got pregnant…by the time the cradle was ready, I was ready, prepared to receive the gift of new life.

Look at your life: what gifts from God have we missed—and didn’t know we were missing—because we never took the time to stop, pray, and ask questions?